


Composure

by Skyelo_Ren



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Belligerent Sexual Tension, Emotional Constipation, Eventual Smut, F/M, Post-Canon, Queen of Denial, Supreme Leader Kylo Ren, of the Thirst Order, versus Rey
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-27
Updated: 2019-10-27
Packaged: 2020-09-27 19:49:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 36,192
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20413345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skyelo_Ren/pseuds/Skyelo_Ren
Summary: Months after the Battle of Crait, Kylo leaves the First Order and shows up at the Resistance base. Rey is adamant that she is completely unaffected by his presence. She's lying.





	1. This Is Fine.

**Author's Note:**

> I'll be honest: The TROS trailer has me feeling all kinds of Desperate(TM), so in retaliation I decided to make my favourites suffer through some semi-crack medium-burn sexual tension.

“Are you sure you want to be here for this?” Finn said quietly.

Rey could hardly hear him over the whir of the TIE Silencer’s engines, but he had asked her the same question at least eight times now, so she repeated the answer she’d been giving him all morning:

“_Yes_, I’m _fine_.”

“Are you sure? You look kinda--”

“I said I’m fine!”

His concern was unnecessary, and frankly a bit strange. He only knew a small fraction of what had transpired between her and Be-- her and _Kylo Ren_. Rey had decided to keep most of the details to herself. Not that they mattered all that much, anyway. It had all happened so long ago. Two hundred and fifty seven days ago, to be exact. And the Resistance had fought plenty of battles in the interim. Crait, and the events that had led up to it, was just a little skirmish in comparison. Hardly even worth thinking about. It was just a very small thing that had happened a very long time ago.

So it hadn’t bothered Rey at all when she learned that Be--_Kylo_ had been in contact with General Organa for several months (completely without Rey’s knowledge, which made perfect sense, since she was rarely involved in Leia’s private communiques, and whatever the two of them had been speaking of almost certainly held no interest to her), and during those _months_ (which Rey, recall, had not known anything about; not that it bothered her) they had come to an agreement, the details of which were still not completely known to her. But it appeared to involve Kylo Ren joining the Resistance. Which was... mildly interesting to Rey, just as it would to be to any reasonably curious person.

And so, now here he was. Kylo Ren. Arriving at the Resistance base on Ovanis. The Supreme Leader of the First Order who had now, inexplicably, defected from the First Order. A plan that had apparently been in motion for some time. Completely without Rey’s knowledge. Her input hadn’t been required at all. Which was fine, as it really wasn’t any of her business anyway.

It was all just so… _fine_.

The engines finally stilled and the cockpit opened, and a rather large object exited, with more grace than something of its size should rightfully have. The large thing turned out to be _him_, and even from a distance he seemed quite a bit larger than Rey expected (though, as previously mentioned, it had been a long time; and she hadn’t had much reason to remember any details, especially those pertaining to size).

Kylo moved toward their emergency defence force-cum-welcoming party, and it became increasingly obvious to Rey that no one had any right to be that big. It simply should not be allowed. It was _inconsiderate_. Who exactly did he think he was? Taking up _so much_ space. Walking across the airfield like _that_? Allowing his cape to catch the breeze _just so_? (And who wears a cape in a starfighter, anyway?)

By the time he stopped in front of Leia -- just out of range of Rey’s lightsaber reach, she noted -- she had decided that the whole situation was actually funny. She could feel something… fluttering… in her upper abdomen. Yes, that must be laughter. Ha... ha. What a ridiculous sight he was! With his stupid high collar and his stupid high boots and his stupid mouth opening to let out his stupid voice--

Oh.

“General. Thank you for agreeing to this meeting,” Kylo Ren’s stupid voice said; and something inside Rey’s chest began hammering madly against her ribcage. _Oh_.

This was fine.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Raise your hand if you, like Rey, have ever felt personally victimised by Kylo Ren's voice.


	2. Paper Thin Plans

Leia released the Resistance crewers to their normal duties within minutes of Kylo’s arrival, and the two of them had been sequestered together in the war room for hours. Rey retreated to the hangar, and apart from the occasional curious murmur passed around small groups at the astromech station, it was an unremarkable afternoon on Ovanis base.

She and Chewie worked on the Falcon in their usual companionable silence. They had decided that Unkar Plutt’s compressor hadn’t actually been a terrible idea: it had just been executed poorly. But doing the job properly meant a lot of tedious rewiring of circuitry that looked like it hadn’t been touched in decades.

Rey liked the work, because it was intricate enough to keep her mind off almost anything.

Almost.

“Kylo Ren arrived today,” she reported.

Chewie already knew, of course -- everyone on base did -- but he was safe to talk to. He knew more than anyone else about what had happened, and had very cleverly avoided ever mentioning any of it.

He didn’t mention it now, either. But he sounded curious when he gently prodded for more details.

“I don’t know. He’s been with the General all day. He didn’t say anything… not to me, anyway.” _He didn’t even look at me_, she didn’t add.

Chewie’s reply was a gentle, non-committal trill.

“Yeah, you’re probably right.”

It didn’t matter why Kylo was here. It wouldn’t bother her if she never found out. What _did_ bother her -- was gnawing at her core the way the years had gnawed at the insulation on the circuitry she was stripping from the hull -- was the fact that he was here _now_. What interest did the Resistance hold for him now that it hadn’t held two hundred and fifty seven days ago?

Rey wasn’t ungrateful for the delay. She considered it a very good thing that he hadn’t come back with her that day, such a long time ago. Just imagine what it would have been like if he had. Rey would have had to spend months and months dealing with his embarrassingly distinctive walk and impractical fashion choices. And she was sure that she would have been the one stuck talking to him all the time, because no one else would want to. It would have been just the two of them, most of the time. Especially late at night. That’s when he’d bother her the most: and especially on cold nights, so she’d have to build a fire, and his voice would be so low she’d have to move nearer to hear all the things he was telling her; and his big big hands would be so close to hers, and...

“I’m going to grab some air,” she said abruptly, and dashed past Chewie and down the loading ramp toward the open chaos of the hangar.

By the time her foot hit the landing pad a plan had begun to take form in her mind.

Rey had quite a bit of freedom on base, compared to most of the crewers. She didn’t have a set routine of tasks or a schedule that needed to be kept to. Her days were spent working on the Falcon, or practicing her saber forms, or helping Finn or Rose with their own jobs. No one ever asked her for anything else. So when Leia had ordered everyone back to “normal duties” it had meant that Rey was free to use those hours in whatever way she thought would be most useful.

Still, strictly speaking, her normal duties didn’t typically involve hunting down C-3PO and extorting information from him. But today wasn’t a normal sort of day, and this was a matter of organisational security. Three upgrades and an oil bath later, she left the mech office armed with the knowledge that Kylo Ren had been assigned quarters in the south wing and his keycode was 5622B.

Here was the problem, as Rey saw it: Kylo Ren’s suddenly affinity for the Resistance was suspicious, and every second that passed without the mystery being solved was making her feel hot and itchy.

And here was Rey’s solution: she was going to snoop through his things.

The most recent round of gossip indicated that he was still holed up with Leia, but Rey wasn’t completely reckless, so she scouted out the south wing corridor for a moment before approaching his door and knocking.

No response.

Another knock, louder.

Still nothing.

It was at this moment that Rey first noticed the flaw in her plan. There was a real risk that he could return unexpectedly while she was inside the room, and that would lead to an awkward line of questioning with no hope of escape. The thought made her mouth feel dry and sticky. But… she’d come this far already, and she had the keycode to unlock the door. It wasn’t in her nature to let such a hard-won resource go to waste. And these were extraordinary circumstances. There was no harm in taking a quick peek, just to… see. To make sure everything was okay.

Just one small look to slake her curiosity so she’d never ever need to come back here.

She squeezed through the door before it was fully open so she wouldn’t have a chance to change her mind. It shut tight behind her and she pressed her back up against it, taking up as little space as possible as she surveyed the room with scavenger’s eyes.

Rey had made a terrible, terrible mistake.

Her mind registered her Jedi sense before all others, and it told her that this place was simmering with his presence. He had been here, right here, very recently. Her sight came next, and… yep, those really did appear to be Kylo’s clothes (freakishly large cape included) folded on the bed.

Then: sound. She heard running water. Lots of it. From the direction of the refresher. Where he no doubt was, which was why he hadn’t answered the door, which was exactly why Rey needed to get out of this place _right now_.

Unless… _unless_. Unless maybe this was actually the perfect situation. If Kylo was in there, distracted (he was _in there_ but his clothes were _out here_ and that was a very important detail for reasons that Rey refused to remember), then this might be her best chance of not getting caught. All she had to do was listen out for the sound of the water shutting off, giving her the perfect signal that it was time to slip out of the room undetected.

She began a circuit of the room, her eyes instinctually scanning for oddities, but apart from his clothes everything appeared to be standard Resistance-issue equipment. When she reached the door again (after carefully avoiding brushing any part of her body against any part of the bed) the stream of running water slowed and then stopped. Perfect timing. She might just get away with this, if she stuck to The Plan and snuck out before he had time to towel off and get dressed.

But, for reasons that Rey couldn’t explain, following an instinct she couldn’t force herself to begin to contemplate... she found a sudden interest in the climate panel next to the doorway and spent a few seconds adjusting the thermostat.

A few seconds turned into a few minutes, but there was no sign of movement from behind the refresher door. Rey dialled the temperature up a degree, contemplated a moment, and returned it back to its starting point. Her eyes flicked toward the door with increasing frequency. What was he doing in there? An image came unbidden to her mind of a damp curl of black hair being brushed off a pale neck, and her foot began to jiggle with impatience.

Finally the piercing silence was released. Rey heard a sigh. And then, his voice:

“If you won’t leave, at least turn around.” He sounded exasperated. Exhausted.

A distant part of her mind was chiding her, claiming that she should have known -- that she _did_ know -- that he could sense her presence in his space. That she should have -- _had_, in fact -- expected this. She tamped it down.

She turned her back to the door, wiping her palms against her thighs to steady her voice. “Alright, I--”

A ‘click’ interrupted her as the door mechanism swung open. From the corner of her eye she saw a few items of black clothing jerk up off the bed and launch themselves behind her, as if an invisible hand had thrown them. The door closed again with more force than was perhaps necessary.

A moment later she heard the click again, and turned in time to see a (thankfully) fully-dressed Kylo stalking from the steamy bathroom. He didn’t look in her direction as he walked past her to the bed and began to tug on his gloves.

“Did you find what you were looking for?” He reached for the cape next and began fastening it to his shoulders. The precise, practiced movements of his fingers were absolutely enraging, and it took all of Rey’s willpower not to shout at him about all of the reasons why wearing a cape in a military bunkroom at five thirty in the afternoon was such a stupid thing to do.

Especially for someone who already looked so tall.

“I wasn’t looking for something. I was… sent here.” Being sent by her own conscience counted, right?

His eyes flicked to hers for the first time, with slightly raised brows. “You were sent here,” he repeated slowly. Dry scepticism oozed out of him to fill the air between them.

“_Yes_,” Rey bit out. She leaned back and forced her voice to steady. “I was sent to show you where the mess hall is. I assume you’re planning to eat, while you’re here. Or are you already too full of yourself?”

Kylo exhaled through his nose in an odd laugh that was devoid of humour. His eyes left her face and began to examine the rest of her, systematically, as if he were taking inventory. He focused for a moment on the long scar on her wrist. It was new: a burn mark she’d gotten while repairing her lightsaber.

“I’m beginning to wonder if you’ve ever said a single honest thing in your life.”

She swallowed. _What, exactly, did you expect to happen?_, that little part of her snapped. “Believe what you want, Kylo. Do you want to starve, or not?”

He gestured imperiously for her to precede him out the door.

Rey led him through the warren-like corridors of the south wing, trying not to be bothered by her awareness of his gaze piercing through the spot right between her shoulder blades.

She would admit, though, that she couldn’t help feeling a little bothered by the way that he stepped up beside her and wrapped his gloved hand around her upper arm, when they finally reached their destination.

It was still a few minutes before the dinner hour, so there were only a handful of crewers milling around waiting to get in line for food. Most of them cast curious glances toward the pair. She fought down a blush at the thought of what they must look like, standing so close together in the frame of the doorway.

“I’m not here to antagonise you,” he said; and Rey began to boil, because this was exactly what she hadn’t wanted -- for him to use that low voice that gave her no choice but to lean in even closer toward him, tilting her ear up toward his lips. “I didn’t expect you to barge your way in like that, although…”

He paused, and his tone shifted, becoming lighter. Teasing, almost. She didn’t dare turn to him, because if she did she might actually see the half-smile she could hear.

“... although, maybe I should have. You have a habit of turning up in places you don’t belong.”

Rey felt as though the ceiling had opened up and doused her in ice water. _You have no place in this story._

“Rey. Look at me.” He squeezed her arm lightly, and she bristled at the presumption, but met his eyes anyway, glaring. He jerked his chin toward the serving trays that were being set out. “Go and get your food, then come back with me… we can talk--”

Rey shook her head, cutting off his speech.

“No,” she said clearly. “I don’t need to hear what you have to say, and I would much rather sit with my friends than suffer through a meal alone with you.” She tugged her arm from his grip and painted a sweet smile onto her face. “There’s some honesty for you.”

Kylo looked disappointed: not sad, but as if he had been let down. As if he had expected better from her. From himself.

“Believe what you want, Rey.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The chapter title is from 'Death By A Thousand Cuts' by Taylor Swift, which coincidentally is what Ben is going to think is happening to him every time he tries to flirt.


	3. You've Ruined My Life

“And the Neimodian says: ‘No, it’s because they miss their mothership’.”

Rey had heard the joke before, but Finn looked so pleased with his delivery of the punchline that she laughed just as loud as Chewie.

None of the Resistance crewers were particularly fond of cooking, so they all shared the duties on a rotating roster… that Rey had somehow been left out of, but she liked to tag along with Finn on his shift, and Chewbacca usually wasn’t far behind her. Today the three of them had taken over the main kitchen, and the sounds and smells of cooking combined with the sight of her two dearest friends made Rey feel the most relaxed she had in the thirteen long days since Kylo’s arrival.

“I’ve got one,” Rey said. “A man in an airspeeder is pulled over by a stormtrooper. The trooper looks in the back and sees--”

“Oh, this is Rose’s one, the one where they visit the zoo, right?” Finn laughed heartily. “Yeah, it’s a good one.”

“Hah… yeah, maybe she’s told it. I heard it in Niima, I didn’t know it had spread this far.”

“Pick another one then, it’s still your turn.” He dipped his little finger into the sauce he was mixing and tasted it. “But hold that thought for a minute. This is going to need more catabar after all.”

He slipped away into the storeroom, and Rey tried her hardest to bite back the flash of disappointment she felt.

Finn was Rey’s best friend, and she was his. But Rose was his best friend too, _and_ Poe was his best friend, _and_ all of Black Squadron was incredibly fond of him, and… Rey couldn’t blame any of them at all, but she wasn’t accustomed to sharing. It was something she’d never experienced growing up on Jakku.

But of course the Resistance was all about sharing: resources, information, jokes, equipment. And Rey tried, really tried _so hard_ to fit in with it all. And it felt so nice when she succeeded to feel like a part of something bigger than herself. When she felt connected to everything, the way that Luke Skywalker had once tried to teach her.

Still, it wouldn’t be terrible to have something -- or some_one_ \-- that was just hers; that she wouldn’t ever have to share. Something (someone) that wouldn’t be disappointed by her more selfish thoughts and would always be there whenever she---

“Hello,” Kylo Ren said.

She couldn’t help flinching when she turned and saw him there, suddenly. He was leaning against the serving counter as if he had a right to be there, looking completely unapologetic for having interrupted her train of thought.

Rey scowled at him. “It’s not lunch hour yet.”

“I know. Usually they have something ready for me.” He stood up to his full height (so stupidly high) to look over her head, perhaps searching for someone to support his claim

“We’re pretty busy, actually, so you’ll have to stick to the schedule just like everyone else.” Rey couldn’t believe the audacity of this incredibly masculine person, with his expectations that everyone would drop whatever they were doing just for him, and those beauty spots right next to his nose that she always found it hard to look away from.

She folded her arms across her chest in a no-nonsense pose, to demonstrate how serious she was about the “no early meals allowed” policy that she wasn’t certain existed, but was suddenly determined to enforce.

Kylo folded back down to rest his elbows on the counter. They were almost the same height now.

“Do you want me to come back when you’re free to eat as well?”

“That… would be the correct time, yes, but it has nothing to do with _me_.”

“I disagree.”

“I don’t care if you agree or not!”

“Guys?” Finn’s voice interrupted. “Less arguing, more meal-prepping.”

Rey took a few steps back, feeling flushed and, for some reason, just a little bit lightheaded. Finn opened one of the warming cupboards under the counter and, defying all logic, brought out a full meal tray that had obviously been prepared ahead of time.

Finn’s tone was perfunctory, but not unkind. “Here. There’s dessert today too, but it hasn’t cooled yet. You’ll have to come back if you want it.”

“Thank you,” Kylo said politely. He glanced at Rey with an expression she couldn’t decipher and retreated to the far corner of the mess hall.

Rey cleared her throat and tugged the hem of her shirt to straighten it. She followed Finn back to the benchtop they had been working at before the interruption. “I can’t believe you actually had something ready for him,” she said.

“Oh, he comes early,” Finn said with a casual shrug. “I think he probably doesn’t want everyone staring at him while he eats. Which, yeah, is fair enough.”

That corroborated Rey’s own observations: she had only seen him at meals three times, always tucked away in that same secluded corner. There was a fourth time he had tried to sneak in at the end of the dinner hour (_tried_, but the thought of Kylo Ren sneaking was a bit preposterous; he was so dark and distinctive that her eyes were always drawn to him immediately). He’d walked back out again with an armful of protein bars, and it was such suspicious behaviour that she had felt an almost painful urge to follow him back to his bunk and see what he was up to. But, that had turned out so poorly the last time…

“So you just let him have special treatment?”

“Well he’s gotta eat, Rey.”

She knew a lost cause when she saw one, so she rounded on the Wookiee for backup. “And you’re okay with this, Chewie? This… this misuse of the kitchen?”

Chewbacca, who had accompanied her here with the sole intent of pilfering a snack before lunchtime, froze with a handful of diced beef halfway to his mouth. He shrugged shyly and mumbled something to the effect of: ‘_it’s true, growing boys need to eat_’.

“What-- that-- he… he is not _growing_!” Rey whirled her head toward the corner that Kylo had retreated to, to confirm that they were seeing the same thing that she was: a very much adult-sized human male hulking over his plastic cafeteria tray, using cutlery that looked like children’s toys in his ridiculously large hands. “And... if he _is_ growing, then he really ought to _stop_!”

Finn rubbed a hand over his scalp, mussing the little curls that were starting to grow. “Rey. I get it, I really do. I fought him too. But we’re all on the same side now. Maybe give him a chance?”

Rey frowned at him.

“You gave me one,” Finn continued, gently. “Where would I be now if you hadn’t? Think about that.”

His calm acceptance of their former enemy seemed so out of place. Unless… “You’ve been talking to him, haven’t you.”

Finn lifted one shoulder in a half-shrug. “Yeah. I see him on my shifts here. And I’ve been in with him and Leia: he still has contacts in the FO and they wanted to know if I had any thoughts about who might be interested in getting out.”

This new piece of information set her on fire. The thought of Leia and Kylo together, inviting various members of the Resistance to join in their confidence -- all of the members _except_ for Rey, apparently -- was absolutely beyond infuriating.

And then, to top it all off:

“He’s asked about you, you know.”

“Of course he has,” Rey hissed, fighting to keep her voice down so it wouldn’t carry across the empty hall; fighting to keep it from shaking. “Because he’s made it his goal in life to torture me.”

Suddenly she had Finn’s full attention. He pulled her around a corner, still near Chewbacca but out of sight of the mess hall, and placed a serious, comforting hand on her shoulder. “Are you sure? I wish you’d told me sooner. What’s he done, Rey?”

“Well… it’s not so much what he’s _done_, it’s just... you know.” She flung a hand behind her in Kylo’s general direction, gesturing earnestly.

“He hasn’t hurt you?”

“Well, no…”

“Is he, you know, following you? Inappropriately?”

“No,” she admitted bitterly. “He hasn’t come near me at all.”

Finn looked to Chewie for support and the two of them shared a look of concerned confusion.

Rey took a steadying breath and glanced between them. Finn was the first friend she’d ever had, and Chewie had stood by her through everything. She trusted these two people more than anyone else in the galaxy. She’d gladly risk her life for them, and knew they’d do the same for her without hesitation.

Still, the next words she spoke made her want to fling herself off a cliff and never be seen by either of them again.

“It’s… the way he looks.”

There was a long, awkward pause while the three of them looked at each other, all of them wondering whose turn it was to talk next.

“The way he looks?” Finn prompted eventually.

‘_You mean this?_’ Chewie asked, and furrowed his furry face in a surprisingly passable impression of Kylo’s scowl.

Rey bit her lip. “No, not the expression, just… all of it.”

The next time she met Finn’s eyes his own expression had cleared as if a fog had lifted. He quickly averted his gaze from her sheepishly, and rubbed his hair again. “Uh, I’m not sure that’s a problem I can help you with. It’s a doozy, though. I mean, I’ve been there.” His expression brightened. “Hey, maybe talk to Rose about it.”

“No!” Rey said quickly. “No, the last thing I want is more people involved. I’ll… find a way to deal with it. I just… won’t look at him, anymore. Ever.”

“Sure,” Finn said, sounding sceptical; and perhaps he was right to, because Rey immediately took a few steps back into the main kitchen space to look out into the mess hall to where Kylo was seated.

“What’s taking him so long?” she complained, though only several minutes had passed and he still had an almost-full tray in front of him.

‘_Maybe he’s hoping you’ll leave so he can come back and get his dessert_’, Chewie said, with an odd tone she couldn’t quite place.

Rey narrowed her eyes stubbornly. “Fine. Wish granted.” She snatched up a small slice of cake, placed it on a napkin, and ducked through the small doorway that separated the serving area from the dining hall. Inexplicably, as she walked away she heard a quiet chortle from Chewbacca and a hasty ‘shh!’ from Finn.

A muscle on Kylo’s cheek twitched as she neared him, and if she didn’t know better she would think he looked nervous instead of annoyingly arrogant.

“Here,” she said, sliding the dessert beside his tray with more gentleness than she had been feeling on the walk over here. After all, her earlier actions aside, she wasn’t the sort of person that took pleasure from standing at a window and deciding how much food people got. “I didn’t know you had a deal with Finn, alright? So, here, this is yours.”

_Maybe give him a chance_, Finn had urged her. And now that she was looking at him look up at her with just a hint of anticipation in his eyes, Rey allowed herself to admit for the first time that maybe she wanted to.

She sat down across from him without waiting for an invitation. His eyes tracked her movement, and that seemed dangerous, somehow, so she abruptly stood up again and rounded the small table to sit beside him instead. Kylo straightened to make room for her on the bench (it was built to seat two, but he took up so much _space_) and they carefully arranged themselves so that there were no points of contact between them. Whenever Rey shifted he did too, as if she was surrounded by a magnetic force field that couldn’t be breached.

The silence was so uncomfortable that she was almost grateful when he broke it, even if it meant hearing his voice.

“What did the trooper see?”

“What trooper?”

“That’s where you got up to. The trooper saw…?”

“Oh. No, see, that wasn’t real. It wasn’t an actual trooper. It’s just a made up story to make people laugh.”

Kylo looked confused by her words, so she tried to come up with a better description of the concept.

“It’s supposed to be funny. See, it ends in a way you wouldn’t expect.” She paused to check his understanding, but he looked even more incredulous than before, as if she were speaking a different language. “Fine, let me start at the beginning. They’re these little stories that we tell each other, and they’re made up--”

“Are you really trying to explain what a joke is? Do you honestly believe I don’t know?”

Rey fought an inconvenient urge to giggle. “Sorry. I just thought… that’s not the sort of thing you _do_.”

“What exactly do I not do?”

“Have fun.”

He considered this a moment. “You’re right,” he announced nonchalantly, and began eating again.

Rey did laugh this time, but quickly sobered. If she let herself laugh, she might be tempted to do other things, too. Things she could never take back.

She reached out toward the slice of cake she had delivered, paused for a few seconds, and then pulled it toward herself when he showed no signs of objecting. She devoured it in a few bites and waited politely (if slightly impatiently) until he had finished his lunch before asking one of the dozens of questions that were burning in her mind.

“Why are you so eager to talk to me one day and then ignore me the next?”

Kylo tilted his head. “I could ask you the same question. Remember: _you_ broke into _my_ quarters and then shouted at me for it.”

He was using that almost-teasing tone again. Rey found it hard to resent him for it this time. But she wasn’t quite brave enough to look at him while he was using it, so she fidgeted with her napkin, folding it into abstract shapes and unfolding it again.

“We can’t avoid each other forever if you’re here. We’re on the same side now, so, we could start again. Just forget everything that happened before.”

“No,” he said forcefully.

Rey kept working on creating an intricate pleated pattern. “Isn’t that what you said, though?” Her mouth was so dry suddenly; her voice hoarse. “To let the past die?”

“You’re not my past.”

The pleats were crooked, so she had to start again.

“Look at me.”

Rey did, and immediately cursed her own stupidity, because _the way he was looking at her_…

She began to rise from the bench, and her limbs somehow got tangled around one another. “I should be helping--” she began, but Kylo’s hands reached out to grip her fingers, squeezing calmingly. He used the connection to guide her back to her seat; and Rey, stupid stupid Rey, allowed it to happen.

Because it felt good. That’s all. It felt good and she wanted to let it happen. What was wrong with that?

“It’s a hoversled, not an airspeeder.”

The sudden change of subject brought her out of her trance and she pulled her hands back reflexively. “What?”

“‘A man on a _hoversled_ is pulled over by a stormtrooper’. It makes more sense. You can’t fit ten convorees in the back of an airspeeder.”

Rey rolled her eyes, slightly impressed that he knew her joke, but absolutely disgusted that the way he told it was so _wrong_. “No, it’s an airspeeder. The convorees are all squished in on top of each other.” She made two fists and pressed them together in different configurations to demonstrate. “They’re so obvious. That’s why it’s funny.”

Kylo smiled. It wasn’t much; it was just a little curl on either side of his lips, but it changed his entire face; and Rey felt something deep inside her curl in response.

She stood abruptly, with enough force to shift the bench away from the table even though he still sat on it.

“I should be helping Finn,” Rey mumbled as she walked away.

He didn’t call her back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title is from 'Gorgeous', by Taylor Swift, who I have apparently decided is the official sponsor of this fic.


	4. the mess that you wanted

Rey had missed out on the events leading up to the Battle of Crait, but she’d heard about them over and over at security briefings. Everyone was determined that the Resistance would never again be surprised by new tracking tech. So even though Ovanis had been secure for almost a year, a full scan of the area was completed every fortnight to make sure there were no signs that enemy scouts had passed nearby. Kylo Ren had reported that the First Order didn’t have any more unknown trackers up their sleeves, but Leia remained incredibly cautious.

Rey’s role was to augment the droid scans with her Force sensitivity, and she took it very seriously. It was one of her only jobs on base and she refused to fail in it (after all, the last mission Rey had been given was to find Luke Skywalker, and… that hadn’t gone according to plan).

So she did her very best not to make a face when Commander D’Acy suggested that Kylo lend his assistance and accompany Rey on her next hike. And she tried incredibly hard not to groan when Leia agreed that it was a sensible idea. And as the day went on she was able to convince herself of the logic of the plan: Kylo could reach out his senses just as well as Rey could, and he was more familiar with First Order tech than anyone else on base.

Since he was, until recently, the Supreme Leader of the First Order.

Why did everyone else keep forgetting that?

Rey woke up the next morning and resolved to be civil: for the sake of the mission. And because she might have an opportunity to question him further about his motives for being here. She was an adult, after all, completely capable of maintaining her composure and cooperating politely with an ally.

It all fell apart the moment she saw him.

“Where’s your equipment?” she demanded.

Kylo pushed back the side of his cape and indicated the lightsaber clipped to his belt.

Rey resisted the urge to brandish her own weapon. “Did you miss the part where it was explained that we were climbing a plateau?” She hefted her substantial backpack for emphasis.

“I was told it usually takes you only a few hours.”

“It’s still climbing. A plateau. It’s really high.”

“I was also told you created a path several months ago.”

She nodded reluctantly.

“So we’ll be walking. On a path. For a few hours. I think I can manage myself.”

She grumbled and pushed past him. “Fine. But don’t expect me to come down and rescue you when you trip over your ego and fall into a crevasse.”

“Are there many crevasses along this path of yours?”

“Well, no… Just, fine, come on.”

Rey set a steady pace without bothering to check if he was keeping up. After they’d settled in she explained her plan, more to fill the silence than because she thought he needed to know.

“The droids do a full spiral scan at ground level and then at strato. But there might be things they’re not picking up: new tech that they’re not calibrated to recognise. So I, I can do this thing where I reach out-- well, _you_ know how it is. Um. And there’s this one plateau that works really well. I can feel everything from up there. Because it’s so high up, I guess. And if I feel something suspicious I comm it back to base and the droids do a targeted sweep. That’s… it.”

Something prickled on the back of her scalp. Rey turned and saw Kylo had stopped walking. Instead he was intent on the plateau ahead of them, his eyes focused and yet slightly glazed. _He’s reaching out_, she realised, and watched him with open fascination. She’d never seen anyone else do it before. She’d seen him use the Force, of course, but she’d learnt that there was a big difference between using and simply experiencing.

It felt like she spent an eternity watching him, examining the way his brow furrowed and his jaw softened; but when he blinked and started walking again she somehow knew that only seconds had passed.

“It’s not the altitude,” he said, sounding thoughtful, almost as if he were talking to himself. “You’ve found a nexus.”

“Oh, yeah,” Rey said, determined not to reveal her ignorance. “I thought it might be... that.”

They lapsed back into silence. She kept her features as calm as possible while she furiously tried to piece together what in the world a ‘nexus’ was.

“Do you have emergency shelter in that pack?” he asked suddenly. He was studying the sky suspiciously, head tilted back to reveal an impossibly long neck that Rey refused to look at.

Instead she followed his gaze up to the perfect sapphire-blue sky. There were, maybe, a few wisps of white cloud way off on the horizon.

“I think we might be okay,” she said sarcastically. “I’m sure you can ‘manage yourself’ against those big scary clouds. Besides, it never rains here.”

\--- --- ---

“It really, really doesn’t ever rain here,” she said again, panting from exertion. She moved quickly to the far end of the shallow cave, as if putting more distance between herself and the storm would make it disappear.

“Yes, I heard you the first eight times,” Kylo said dryly. Which was ironic, because he was just as waterlogged as her. He removed one of his gloves (the leather creaked, as if it, too, was thoroughly unimpressed with Rey) and he used his bare hand to swipe the water from his face.

Rey looked away and busied herself by digging into her pack for a firestarter. Yes, she was soaked to the bone; and no, she hadn’t brought an emergency shelter; and no, she hadn’t considered the possibility of needing one. But she’d remembered seeing this cave a few months ago, and she was able to find it again relatively quickly. And now she would light a fire, because she’d had enough forethought to bring equipment for that. She was still completely in control of this situation.

She built a small pit and created a flickering flame in record time. Calmed by her success, she huddled close to the fire -- still too small to give off any warmth -- and watched Kylo struggle to remove his heavy, sodden cape. She felt a thrill of vicious pleasure… until he turned toward the far corner of the cave and flicked the fabric up and away from him in one smooth motion. The water sluiced from it immediately, pooling onto the ground and leaving the garment looking relatively dry. Rey was pretty sure he hadn’t mentioned _that_ to any of the commanders, when he swore that the First Order didn’t have any more secret tech.

Kylo approached the fireside and bent down to drape the now-dry fabric over her shoulders, careful not to make contact with her.

“I’m fine, I don’t need it,” Rey protested, but her teeth betrayed her by chattering.

“No, of course not.” He sat down heavily: far enough away to be non-threatening, but close enough that she could reach out and touch him if she wanted to. Which she didn’t.

Absolutely nothing about this situation was familiar.

“You should bring a shelter next time. And something to ward off lightning. These locations are known for their erratic weather patterns.”

“-- weather patterns, yeah, exactly,” Rey echoed. “They’re so erratic here. Because of the... nexus. I should have warned you. Sorry.”

His clothes had been relatively dry, but his hair was so thick and heavy that enough water ran from it to soak his shoulders in less than a minute. He bent his head over his crossed legs and raked his hands through it over and over, flinging large drops of water away from him after each pass. Rey didn’t even bother pretending not to watch him. She pulled the cape closer around herself (the underside was soft and warm; she tried not to realise that the warmth had come from his body).

“Is there anything you’d like to ask me?” he said coyly.

Rey’s pulse jumped. “No. Not a thing.”

Kylo finished shaking out his hair -- Rey saw every excruciating movement -- and spun to face her fully, so only one side of him was illuminated by the fire. “A nexus is a physical location, usually a geographical formation like your plateau, that acts as a channel for the Force. They’re usually at high altitudes, but not always. Most temples were built at such locations. The old Jedi Temple on Coruscant is the largest known. It covers an entire mountain.”

It sounded as if he were reading from an instruction manual. But his tone held a confidence that was deeply personal. Like maybe he had _written_ the manual.

“You’ve known about this stuff all your life,” she said, not quite a question.

He nodded; and although it was just confirming what she already knew, Rey felt an ugly bolt of jealousy stab through her. She quickly tamped it down as best she could. This moment was rife with the opportunity she had been seeking.

“Did you learn it from Leia?”

“Some of it,” he said, very carefully.

She pressed her advantage. “Is that why you’re here? To… reconnect with her?”

“No.”

“_Why_, then?”

He considered her carefully, then glanced at the cave entrance and seemed to be considering that, too. “I’m more than happy to give you an honest answer, but I’m concerned that you’re stubborn enough to storm out into the rain again if you decide it’s not what you want to hear.”

Rey blinked, stung by this unfair accusation. “I’m not stubborn,” she said stubbornly.

He smiled a little. “So then I have your word that I won’t need to track you down and drag you back to base to be treated for hypothermia?”

Rey watched the flames dance, chewing lightly on her bottom lip. Of course she wouldn’t literally run away. But, did she truly want to hear whatever he said next? Instead of answering, she said: “I think I’ve been to a nexus before. There was a peak and all of these old carvings and… now that I think about it, it used to rain all the time.” She added sheepishly: “But never as bad as this.”

His shoulders slumped on an exhale, but he recovered quickly. “Is that where you were with Luke?”

“Yes.” A thought occurred to her. “Do you think maybe that’s why I could…” She gestured cautiously from herself to him and back again, trying to represent the connection between them that had been discovered on Ahch-To.

He picked up on her meaning instantly. “No. That would happen no matter where you are.”

He sounded certain, but how? Was the connection something else he had studied? Did he know things about it that he wasn’t telling her?

On impulse she tugged lightly on the invisible cord that connected them, trying to tease whatever information she could out of it. She’d kept it tightly clamped ever since Crait. For the first time since that awful day she wondered what might happen if she relaxed her hold on it.

Kylo’s entire body stiffened. She knew what he must be perceiving: the same thing she was. Her entire being was straining away from her toward him, aware of his mind but unable to reach it through the thin but impenetrable barrier between them.

She could lower it in an instant if she chose, and then...

“Go ahead,” he said, his voice like a low rumble of thunder. “This would be infinitely easier if I could see what you were thinking.”

Rey drew back. “Right. You’re totally right, Kylo. That _would_ be easier. Then you wouldn’t need to harass my friends.”

He was so taken aback by her sudden shift that she could tell it took a moment for him to process what she actually said. When he did he looked confused, and offended.

“I haven’t harassed anyone.”

“Oh, really? What about _Finn_? He told me all about how you just couldn’t stop asking questions about me.”

“I asked about you _once_. About that wound on your wrist. I went to _him_ because I knew it would be impossible to get anything resembling a straight answer from _you_.”

Rey glanced automatically at her scar, turning her wrist so it shined in the firelight. The sight of it brought back everything that had led up to it, and when she spoke next her voice shook with an emotion that she couldn’t name. “Why would you even care?”

“I needed to know it wasn’t one of my men who caused it.” He scrubbed his face and sighed deeply, puffing out his cheeks with the force of it. “Rey, you’re going to have to just tell me what it is that you want, because interacting with you is like trying to navigate an asteroid field at lightspeed. You hate it when I try to talk to you. You hate it when I try to give you space. You habitually seek me out and then blame me for letting you. It’s exhausting. So, here, you win. Tell me what you want, and that’s what I’ll do.”

“Who says I ‘want’ anything from you?” she snapped.

“Stop deflecting. What do you want?”

Maybe it was a fair question. Rey listened to the rain for a long time while she considered her many answers. She wanted a generous stockpile of food and water. She wanted a family who wanted her, who cared enough to teach her about what she was and the things she could do. She wanted the war to be over so she wouldn’t lose anyone else. She wanted to _go home_, but she didn’t have one, and she couldn’t imagine where she’d start looking.

“I just want to feel safe,” she said eventually.

She’d taken a long time to respond, but his own reply was immediate. “You are safe. I’ve killed for you. I’ll do it again, if I have to.”

That was almost nice, Rey thought, but it wasn’t what she was looking for. It wasn’t _enough_. She shook her head and kept watching the storm outside.

She had met someone, once, a long time ago, who had given her what she wanted. Who protected her even while making her feel strong enough to not need any protection. Who filled in all of her blind spots so she was invincible.

But he wasn’t here, and she didn’t know why he’d left or if he’d ever come back.

Maybe she had imagined him.

Just like she had imagined having parents who loved her.

She was so, so sick of waiting.

“You can touch me. Just a bit.”

He exhaled harshly, almost a laugh. “I need you to be more specific.”

Rey dropped his cape and the cold air hit her, stoking her recklessness. She manoeuvred up onto her knees and closed the small gap between them. “My skin. With yours. You can touch me. But only a little bit.”

Kylo’s head shook. His features folded into a concerned frown. “I think that’s a terrible idea.”

“Why? It would feel good, wouldn’t it?” When he made no move toward her she added: “You said you’d do what I wanted.”

That felt wrong; just this side of coercive. But she couldn’t bring herself to regret the words, because they finally got a reaction.

With a great, heaving sigh he leaned forward and pressed his lips onto the pulse point just below her ear. Her neck was still damp and chilled from the rain, and in contrast his heat was like a molten brand sinking into her skin, sure to leave a permanent mark.

She gasped and reached out to grip his shoulders so she wouldn’t lose her balance. His own hands came up to rest heavily on her hips, steadying her. His lips travelled down her neck, trailing light but scorching kisses. He reached the dip between her collarbones and, Rey couldn’t be sure, but she thought she felt his tongue dart out and trace it.

She moaned something that might have been his name, and tried to push closer into him. One of her hands had become tangled in his hair, and one of his had wrapped halfway around her thigh; and it would be so easy to sink down into his lap and press all of herself against him. It made so much sense.

But Kylo didn’t allow it. He held her rock-solid despite her wriggling, keeping her up and away from him. All of his fingers squeezed her in warning, digging into her waist, her thigh. “Careful,” he murmured into her skin, before beginning his ascent up the other side of her neck.

“I am careful,” Rey argued automatically, her voice high and breathy. She angled back slightly and slid her hands from his shoulders to fist the hem of her shirt. “Look. I’m so careful.” She began to draw it up, _carefully_, to grant him access to more of her. His hands felt so good on her, almost perfect, but they were _meant_ to be against her bare skin.

Kylo -- infuriatingly, heartbreakingly -- didn’t allow it. He stopped both of her hands with one of his and pulled his mouth away from her with a wet noise that, in spite of everything, made her blush.

His other hand left her thigh and brushed a few strands of hair behind her ear. The gesture seemed like it was meant to calm her. As if she would ever be calm again.

“You said ‘just a bit’.”

“I changed my mind. That was so stupid. Touch me, _a lot_.”

“Rey--”

“I’ll touch you, too. It’ll be--”

“Rey. The rain stopped. We should go back.”

He began to stand, and he was still holding both of her hands, so she had no choice but to rise with him.

The rain had, in fact, stopped, and the newfound silence beat against her painfully. Every nerve ending in her body curled in on itself, shocked and bereft by the sudden lack of sensation.

“You would have regretted it,” he said softly when they were both on their feet again. His thumb rubbed across her knuckles before releasing her.

A stupid, shameful lump grew in her throat. Rey immediately bent down again to retrieve his cape and drew it back across her shoulders without asking permission. She was still wet, after all. She stomped out the fire, turning over the entire event in her mind, finding it impossible to dissect any meaning out of it. Kylo re-packed her backpack and shouldered it silently.

“I was right,” she said finally. “It felt good.”

He nodded. His shoulders rolled as he inhaled (she had felt, with her own two hands, how firm they were) and he ducked through the low cave entrance.

Rey followed him outside, blinking in the sudden sunlight. “Can I ask something?”

He only hesitated for a second. “Of course.”

“Did you _want_ to… keep going? Touch me a lot, like I said?” The words rushed out of her in an embarrassed half-mumble.

“Yes. More than anything.”

They watched each other. The air between them felt different than it had before. Calmer and more frenetic all at the same time. It made her feel profoundly sad.

“I wish I could trust you this much all the time.”

“Yeah, me too,” he sighed.

She handed his cape back. “Here. I’ll warm up as we walk.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Me planning this chapter: There's a cave and a rainstorm and some light petting and it's totally tropey and 100% just for fun
> 
> Me actually writing this chapter: *screeching inhumanly* REY IS A MESS


	5. I Think He Knows

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Remember that joke that Rey was trying to tell back in chapter 2? You might need to know the whole thing to get the full effect of something in this chapter:
> 
> “_A cop pulls over a van and when he walks up to the window he sees ten penguins in the back. He asks the driver ‘Sir, are those your penguins?’_
> 
> _The driver says ‘Yes, they’re my pets.’_
> 
> _The cop says ‘What do you think you’re doing? You need to take them to the zoo right now.’_
> 
> _The driver agrees and drives off. The next day the cop pulls over the same van and this time when he looks in the back he sees the same ten penguins, all wearing sunglasses._
> 
> _‘I thought I told you to take those to the zoo,’ says the cop._
> 
> _The driver says ‘I did, it was great! Today we’re going to the beach.’_”
> 
> Basically I wanted a clean joke with penguins that I could substitute out for porgs, but later decided Ben would know the joke too, and he doesn’t actually know what a porg is yet. So the penguins became convorees.
> 
> Anyway, over-explanation is done. Here’s what you came for:

Sleep evaded her that night.

Rey vacillated wildly between confusion, embarrassment, and a pure, haunting ache that made her desperate to tug on that invisible cord again.

‘_More than anything_,’ he’d said.

He’d wanted to touch her more than _anything_.

He’d wanted to, but he hadn’t, because… because? Because of _her_. Because of what she wanted.

What she’d thought she wanted.

Suddenly the thought of being ‘safe’ seemed so incredibly boring. So completely inadequate in comparison to what she could have had.

Rey wasn’t completely naive. She knew what sexual arousal was. She’d dealt with it before. But she’d never had a concrete experience to connect to it. She’d never had to deal with the ghosts of hands on her hips, goading her on, encouraging her to touch herself. She’d never been so aware of the details of her own fingers: had never been disappointed that they weren’t longer, or thicker; and she’d definitely never imagined them wrapped in leather--

She turned onto her stomach and groaned into her pillow. Tomorrow. Tomorrow she would completely perfect. She’d be calm, and collected, and there wouldn’t be any suspiciously convenient rainstorms or dark caves or wet shoulders to tempt her.

Tomorrow would be fine. But she still had a long night ahead of her.

\--- --- ---

She was right. The next day was fine. Because she didn’t see him at all.

She made it through the entire morning without sensing so much as a hint of him. There was almost a small slip up at lunch time when she was tempted to go to the mess hall early to intercept him; but then she remembered his admonishment from yesterday (‘_you habitually seek me out_’) and sat primly in the Falcon’s cockpit until fifteen minutes into the official lunch hour, when she was certain he would have finished his meal.

No one else seemed very interested in him anymore. It was almost like he was just another unremarkable member of the Resistance. And, sure, by all accounts he had been enormously helpful to the war council and security team, and there hadn’t been any hint of suspicious activity to suggest that he was a traitor… but he was still _Kylo Ren_. So Rey couldn’t help feeling annoyed when she spent most of the afternoon hanging around the astromech station and failed to hear a single useful piece of gossip.

By the time she retired to her bunk she had gotten used to the idea that she wouldn’t be seeing him at all that day, which is why she didn’t bother reaching out and checking who was at her door when she heard the knock.

“Just a mo,” she called out as she kicked a few items of dirty laundry under the bed (totally against Resistance regulations, but she hadn’t had a lot of free time this week, okay?).

Rey palmed the control panel casually, watched the door open, saw Kylo Ren on the other side, yelped, and instinctually slammed the panel again.

She sucked in several quick breaths as she stared at the door, at a point high up, where his face had been. Where it probably still was. She brought herself up to her full height and cleared her throat quietly before pressing the panel a third time.

“Oh, hello,” she said as casually as she could manage. “Wasn’t expecting you.”

“Clearly,” Kylo said. “I didn’t mean to interrupt your…”

He looked over her head into the room beyond, and she didn’t worry too much about that because there wasn’t a whole lot to see. She had a small table where she polished some useful bits and bobs she had collected; and an empty laundry hamper; and a clothes chest at the end of the bed--

_The bed_. She’d been there just last night. Imagining that her hands were his, imagining his voice in her ear, his breath on her neck, his hair slipping between her fingers.

What a stupid, _stupid_ thing to do. What complete idiocy. He would _know_, of course he would, that’s what he does: he knows things, and he taunts her with them.

“Your… evening,” he finished, when he apparently didn’t find any clue of what she’d been doing.

“It’s fine, you’re not interrupting anything,” Rey said quickly. “Nothing interesting happens in here.”

He nodded as his eyes moved down her body, and-- did they linger on her throat, on their way back up, or was that just one more thing she imagined?

“I came to tell you that I went back to your plateau, and there was no unusual activity.”

That was, possibly, one of the last things she expected him to say. “Why would you go back there?”

“We didn’t complete our mission yesterday,” he said, as if it were that simple.

The truth of it was like a boulder that slammed into her face and then quickly sank to the pit of her stomach. She hadn’t completed their mission. _Her_ mission. She’d put the entire Resistance at risk. And she’d been so selfish that she hadn’t even realised that’s what she had done.

“I… forgot about that,” she said lamely.

“It’s alright,” Kylo said. “I didn’t.”

Rey barely heard him. She stared at some point in the air between them, wondering when she had become so incompetent. “I can’t believe I ruined it.”

“You didn’t ruin anything. I explained to the security team why there was a delay.”

That got her attention. Her eyes snapped to him, wide with terror. “You _what_? What did you tell them?”

She swore she could see the faintest hint of a smirk on his face as he said, clearly, “I explained that there was a storm that made it impossible for us to keep travelling.”

“Oh,” Rey said, her shoulders slumping slightly in relief. “That’s fine.”

He nodded. They stood in awkward silence for a full minute.

“Goodnight, then,” he said.

Guilt gnawed at her as she watched him turn away.

“Kylo, wait.”

“Hm?” He looked back over his shoulder.

Rey chewed on the inside of her bottom lip as she replayed everything. “You did all that for me.”

“I did,” he admitted.

“Even after we’ve been so horrible to each other?”

“It hasn’t all been horrible,” he said quietly.

Rey blushed. “I guess not. Well… goodnight.”

But that niggle of guilt hadn’t been assuaged. Because it had begun to occur to her that he hadn’t been horrible to her, really, since he’d arrived on Ovanis. There was all of that horribleness from _before_ (a long long time ago and, it didn’t even matter anymore, did it?)… but maybe they really could move past that.

“Kylo, wait,” she said again.

He was halfway down the corridor this time, so she took a few quick steps to meet him in the middle. “Do you remember that thing you said, back when-- well, anyway, you said that I needed a teacher. And, you told me that stuff yesterday, about the nexus, and I hadn’t known it at all, so I was wondering, if you had time--”

“Yes,” he said instantly.

“--then maybe-- oh. Okay. Good. Thanks.”

She clasped her hands behind her back and rocked back on her heels slightly, fighting the urge to smile.

Kylo moved forward to close the gap between them and reached out, lightly tugging her arm wrap up as if he were adjusting it. Rey was almost sure that it hadn’t needed adjusting. But she rested her arms against her sides again so he could examine and adjust the other one, too.

“I think you’ll find my methods of instruction quite different to what you were used to with Skywalker,” he murmured; Rey found herself, as always, swaying ever-so-slightly toward him as he talked.

He must have swayed too, because she only had to lift her lips a few inches to reply close to his ear: “I can handle it.”

“I know you can.”

She could hear the smirk in his voice. She pulled back to see it and felt a sudden thrill of anticipation. What had she just gotten herself into?

“There’s an unassigned office space in the north wing, opposite the communication suite. Do you know it?”

Rey nodded.

“Meet me there after breakfast.”

She nodded again, not trusting her voice.

When her door closed securely behind her again she bellyflopped onto her bed without bothering to undress and tried very hard not to think about what alternative ‘methods of instruction’ he had up his sleeve. But her thoughts inevitably kept straying to images of sweaty sparring sessions.

It was another restless night.

\--- --- ---

Rey assumed that she had the wrong room, at first. This room looked just like an office. Not at all like the open-yet-intimate space she definitely hadn’t been imagining the night before. Most of the room was taken up by a large desk covered in neatly stacked datachips next to a central holoprojector. She began to back out of the room, but her back hit something solid.

Kylo’s hand found her shoulder and used it to gently guide her half a step forward so he could maneuver around her into the room.

“Good morning. Thank you for being punctual.” He was carrying a stack of small but heavy-looking wooden boxes under his free arm. He placed these carefully on the desk and then pulled out the chair closest to her. “Take a seat.”

Rey sat, careful not to jostle the cups she was carrying. “I brought you caf,” she said, a bit awkwardly, as she surveyed the intimidating set-up. The holoscreen was already lit, displaying neat rows of notes in what she could only assume was his handwriting.

He accepted the cup and frowned a little before lifting it and taking a sip. “Thank you. I brought you all of this.” He nodded his head toward all of his equipment as he sat opposite her.

“Yeah… thank you. This isn’t exactly what I was expecting.”

“I told you my methods were different.”

“Right. But then you…” she trailed off meaningfully, wiggling her head side to side.

“Then I..?”

“Then you…” She used one hand to gesture expansively toward him.

“Then I _what_, Rey?”

She shook her head and took a hurried sip of her caf. “I just thought you meant something else. It’s fine. Let’s start.”

Kylo, thankfully, allowed the subject to drop. He opened the box next to him and pulled out a thin book bound in aged white leather. He slid it across the table so she could read the title.

_The Jedi Path_

Rey blinked at it, and then up at him. “Also not what I expected.”

Kylo smiled, a bit ruefully. “Yes, there are severe deficiencies with the Jedi religion and its understanding of the Force. But I won’t deny it’s a solid starting point.”

She opened to the first page and saw the title written again in a flourishing font, this time accompanied by an intricate circular symbol that reminded her a bit of the Resistance’s own firebird.

And below it, written in a neat, but childish, hand:

_Property of Ben C. Solo._

Rey slammed the cover shut and pushed the book back toward him. “Or, maybe you could just talk, instead,” she suggested desperately. “You know, I can read books anytime. But they’re not as useful as your, uh, experience.”

“That’s true,” he conceded, and Rey thought maybe she had gotten away with it. “But you already have a good practical base, and superb instincts.” She flushed, not only at the compliment, but at how freely he delivered it. “If we’re going to reach your full potential then you need the theoretical framework to back it up. So follow along with the text, please.”

He nudged the book back to her and ignited the holoprojector, so his words floated in the air between them. Rey opened it without looking and skipped forward a few pages. Now she was looking at a page titled ‘The Jedi Code’, which Kylo gestured for her to flick past. He guided her forward several more chapters to find ‘The First Pillar: The Force’.

He took another sip of the caf she had offered him and grimaced.

“Something wrong with it?” Rey asked.

“No. I don’t usually drink this.”

“Sorry. What do you drink?”

He shrugged. “Water.”

“Oh, how… fun.”

\--- --- ---

Despite the rocky start, Rey truly did enjoy the lesson, and it only took a couple of minutes for her to stop being distracted by the way his lips moved, because the things they were saying were so fascinating. She didn’t bother hiding her disappointment when he told her after just three hours that they had reached a good stopping point.

“We need to start moving anyway. The security assembly is today,” he said reasonably.

“Right, but do they really need us there? Didn’t most of the new information come from you, anyway? So we could just… not go, and say we did.”

Kylo ducked his head and began putting his materials back into neat little piles. “_Everyone_ needs to be there, you know that. And although I know most of what’s on the agenda, you do not.”

She sighed and stood, stretching. “Fine. But next time you need to explain more about tutaminis. You sort of just skipped over it. Um, when is next time, anyway?”

His eyes lingered somewhere around her waist. “Tomorrow, if you like.”

Rey beamed at him, but let it fall when she remembered who she was beaming at. “Thanks. I would like that.”

They walked to the mess hall together in relatively comfortable silence. The place was already crowded, but quieter than usual, as everyone sat in small, tight-knit groups and speculated about the details of what would be announced today. Leia and the other high commanders had re-purposed the serving counters into a high table from which they could address the entire room.

Rey’s eyes easily found Finn at their usual dinner table, and he waved her over.

“Do you want to sit with us?” she asked Kylo.

“I think they expect me at the front,” he said.

“Right. Of course. Well, see you,” she pushed through the crowd without looking back at him, not sure why she was annoyed by the thought of him at the head of proceedings.

Rey slid onto a bench between Finn and Kaydel, but she only had time to say a quick greeting before the room fell utterly silent. Leia had risen from her place at the high table, and although she wasn’t much taller standing than she was when seated, the change was undeniable. She just had that effect on people.

Leia introduced their agenda for the day and the rest of her committee members, ending with Kylo. Rey felt, rather than saw, every eye in the room turn to him -- and suddenly she understood why she was bothered by him sitting up there. It was because, even though she had known how much time he had spent with Leia and the other higher-ups, it had been so easy over the last few days to pretend that he was there just for her.

But now that he was back in his rightful place he was also back to his annoying habit of not even looking at her.

Even in her irritation she found it hard to take her eyes off him, or listen to Commander D’Acy enumerate the tedious details of the First Order’s TIE arsenal. Kylo, on the other hand, wasn’t looking at anyone at all. Shortly after the meeting began he had taken out an actual piece of parchment (where had he even gotten it?) and a pen (???) and had begun laboriously taking notes, his brow furrowed in intense concentration. It was bizarre, since, as Rey had said earlier, all of this intel had come from _him_. He shouldn’t need to take notes.

She actually sniffed in displeasure when he summoned a protocol droid to him, folded up the notes he had been working on for almost an hour, and quietly ordered them taken somewhere. As if he were such an important person that he could order the droids around like servants! (The fact that protocol droids were quite literally servants was entirely beside the point.)

So she didn’t understand, at first, when the droid zig-zagged through the crowd toward her and said, with its voice amplifier set to the lowest possible volume so as not to disturb the humans around it: “Delivery for you, Miss Rey.”

“Uh. Thanks.” Rey took the proferred parchment and quickly placed it under the table on her lap, out of sight of all the curious eyes around her. She fingered the neatly folded corners for the longest three minutes of her life as she stared resolutely at D’Acy, waiting for her friends to lose interest and look away.

When the anticipation began to cause her physical pain she carefully unfolded the note and shifted away from the table just enough to see what he’d written.

It was a drawing. Ten neatly-penned convorees sat in a perfect straight line, each wearing a uniquely-shaped pair of novelty sunglasses. A set of shaded squiggly lines indicated waves lapping at their comically oversized feet. The caption below read: ‘_Water can be fun._’

Rey snorted loudly. All of the curious eyes were back on her an in instant, plus a dozen other pairs from nearby tables. She turned the sound into a cough and pressed the drawing protectively into her thighs. It was _hers_.

Her gaze wandered to him carefully and she found him watching her, just as she expected. She tried to roll her eyes at his dumb and not-at-all funny joke, but it was difficult when her face threatened to split open from the force of the grin she just couldn’t hide. Kylo grinned a bit too, but -- curse him, he was so much better at this than her -- he quickly schooled his features and looked down at the datapad in front of him demurely.

Holy kriff on a stick, she wanted him.

Shewantedhimshewantedhimshewantedhim, she was so sick of _not_ wanting him; she was so incredibly _done_ with keeping it locked up inside her that she smushed up all of her want into a ball and imagined launching it away from her in the Force, hitting him in his enragingly perfect face.

From the corner of her eye Rey saw Leia, who was sitting beside him, raise an eyebrow.

One eternity later, when the crowd had begun to grow restless, the council called a recess and the Resistance rose as one to gratefully stretch their legs. Rey didn’t care at all what it must have looked like, when she sprung from her seat and made a beeline right for him.

“Can I talk to you? In private?”

“Of course,” Kylo said, and politely excused himself from the table. (Did Leia’s eyebrow raise again, or had it been like that the whole time?)

She led him from the hall and down a side corridor, uncomfortably aware of the rest of the crewers beginning to make their way in the same direction. She palmed open a storage closet and ushered him inside, relieved when the door clicked closed before they were spotted. Seconds later she heard a crowd pass their hideout. They watched each other until the last footsteps faded.

Rey stepped forward until she was just within reach of his arms.

“Just a little bit?” she asked. Practically begged.

Kylo’s nostrils flared, but he didn’t move.

Rey tipped her head back, baring her throat to him, hoping he would understand her meaning; and, thank every god that had ever been worshipped on every planet in the galaxy, he _did_, and this time when his lips met her neck he reached out and pulled all of her flush against all of him.

Her hands pressed against his upper chest and she walked him backward until he was pressed against the wall. “Can I touch you here?” she breathed. Kylo nodded; the slight movement caused his lips to part and he sucked lightly on her skin before continuing down her throat. That was new. That was very different. That needed to happen again. “Do that again,” she said, and he obeyed; and then he had the incredible idea all own his own to keep on doing it.

Rey scrabbled at the clasps of his cape and failed. “I really hate this thing, Kylo,” she complained.

He chuckled (she felt it reverberate in her own body, and everything in her abdomen clenched) and pressed his forehead against hers. The wet spot he left on her neck cooled quickly, and she shivered. “I don’t think you truly do,” he said coyly. He reached up to his shoulders -- one at a time, so that he never lost contact with her body -- and then shrugged off the cape. Rey smiled in satisfaction as it thudded heavily on the floor.

“I do hate it,” she promised. “And I hate this thing, too.” She reached up to his collar and began undoing the the tiny little buttons that held his doublet together at the front. She lost patience after the seventh one, and she wasn’t even halfway down his chest. She glared up at him. “I was just teasing, you know, but I now I think I _do_ hate it. How many of these are there?”

Kylo reached down to help her, but she batted his hands away. “No, this is my thing. You go back to your thing.” She felt his chest shake with more laughter as he bent over her again. But he didn’t put his mouth on her: he brought a hand up to brush her hair back away from her face and shoulders and then just… looked at her, while she struggled with his clothes.

_Finally_, she reached the last button, and ripped the halves of his doublet aside to reveal… not the immaculately firm planes of muscle that she expected, but rather _another_ layer of thick black fabric, covered with a complicated-looking set of buckles that crisscrossed between his sleeves.

“Seriously?” Rey groaned.

His hands ran soothingly up and down the sides of her spine, and he kissed the crown of her head. “Sorry. It’s armour, after all.”

“_Why_ are you wearing armour?”

“Why wouldn’t I be wearing armour?”

Rey sighed. At least this shirt looked easier to remove, sleeve buckles notwithstanding. She tugged forcefully to untuck it from his pants and lifted it up his torso… and froze when she saw he was covered by yet another undershirt.

She carefully, quietly, with great precision, lowered the shirt and smoothed out the hem before taking a small step back from him.

“How dare you,” she whispered dangerously.

“I get cold?” he mumbled sheepishly.

“Is this another one of your dumb jokes?”

“No, of cour-- my jokes aren’t dumb… -- of course not. I obviously didn’t expect this to happen.”

He raked a hand through his hair, and some of her fury dissolved, because he looked just a little bit lost. At least she’d gotten rid of his high collar, so she moved back against him and stood on tiptoe to kiss his neck the way he’d kissed hers (carefully choosing the side that was unscarred), adding in a little bite so he knew she was still annoyed.

His arms came around her again, steadying her when she swayed precariously, and a few fingers slipped under her shirt to stroke the skin of her lower back, leaving trails of fire. “Do you want me to--?”

Rey shook her head, reaching up to kiss/bite the angle of his jaw. “This was my idea first. How many pairs of pants are you wearing?”

His fingers clenched against her. “One.”

“Good.” She lowered back down onto her heels. Every single part of her was vibrating with the force of her own pulse as she reached down and found, to her relief, a set of normal buttons. She fumbled her way down them, and he flinched when her hands brushed against him.

She’d never felt more sure and less certain about anything in her life. Somehow looking away made it easier, so she locked eyes with Kylo as she tangled one hand securely into his hair. The other slid into his underwear and she blindly wrapped her fingers around his cock.

He was hard. She had heard enough gossip at the sand baths, and seen enough crude drawings in the starship graveyard, to know that this was good. And she knew enough about Kylo to know that when he sunk his head down onto her shoulder and cursed softly, that it meant this was _very_ good.

Rey pressed her face into his neck and tugged gently on his hair to warn him that she would keep going. She lifted him out away from his clothes and stroked along the length to the tip, intrigued when she felt that it was wet. “Is this… did you… come?”

“Almost,” he said, his voice low and throaty. She felt it vibrate against her lips and pressed them more firmly into his skin. “But, no. That’s just, fluid, uh, pre-ejaculate.”

She finally pulled away from the safety of his upper body and looked down. His cock looked as hard as it felt. It was darker than she had expected: the tip was almost red; and it was, as she had felt, leaking pearly fluid.

“Pria-what?” She rubbed her thumb against the hole the fluid was coming from, to feel the consistency of it. Kylo’s hips bucked into her hand.

“It, uh, it’s what comes before… come.” His words were thick now, almost slurred.

“Will you? Come?” She combed her fingers through his hair as she stroked again, up and down.

“Not if you don’t want me to.”

“What? Of course I want you to come.”

“_Fuck_,” he swore again, softly, but with great feeling. “_Yes_. If you say that again, then yes.”

She released his hair and moved her other hand down to his hips, careful not to lower the shoulder he was leaning on. He _needed_ her, she knew, to keep him steady; just like she’d needed him earlier. She tugged down his pants and underwear to get a better view -- it required an unexpected amount of concentration to keep up the rhythm with her other hand -- but any further questions were interrupted by the sound of loud footsteps right outside the door. The clamour of voices appeared from nowhere and began dancing in the air around them.

“I guess the recess is over,” Rey said, and began to work her hand more quickly. “Now I really do want you to finish, or we’ll be late.”

“Sorry,” Kylo said, lifting his head and leaning it against her forehead instead. His hands slid from her back and hooked in her own waistband, his fingers trying to wiggle underneath. “I haven’t even… Force, you’re so _distracting_. I didn’t want to rush this.” But he didn’t look like he minded all; he looked elated. Younger and more free than she’d ever seen him.

Rey pushed his face back with her own. “It’s fine. I know how to do this on my own, later. Just focus on yourself.”

His jaw slackened and he abandoned his efforts, instead grabbing her ribcage and pulling her in even closer, circling his arms around her. “What do you mean, Rey?”

“Just that I know how to come.”

His eyes scanned her face as if searching for some hidden meaning. His mouth found her throat again and he demanded, between desperate, sucking kisses: “Tell me how.”

“Well. I--” She had to shift to make enough room to maneuver her hand on him; every motion made more difficult by him trying to pull her back against his hips. “I make little circles. Like this.” She used her thumb to make similar circles on his tip; Kylo moaned, and more pre-come leaked from him.

“And… I think. About things that I want to happen.”

He hissed and thrust against her. “What things? Say it.”

“Well. Um.” She _shouldn’t_ be embarrassed to tell him this while they were in their current situation, but she still felt her heart stutter as she said: “Um. Well, lately, I’ve been thinking about. You know. Your hands when you--”

Kylo suddenly grabbed her wrist and pulled her hand firmly away from him. Rey stumbled back half a step in surprise. He leaned his head back against the wall and panted as if he’d just sprinted a mile. The hand that had removed her from his cock was now curled protectively around it.

“Did I say something wrong?”

He grinned at her (he was doing that _so much_ today), his shoulders still heaving. He reached out and took her hand in his free one, and pulled her back in close.

“No. Sorry. I didn’t want to get any on you.”

She understood, then. Rey tugged his other hand open and peered curiously at the mess on his palm, _wishing_ that she hadn’t deflected his offer to touch her… but the noise outside had only grown louder, so she rummaged on the shelves next to them for something to clean him up.

He watched her, his smile seeming to grow wider each time she flicked her eyes up to him, as she wiped his hands and then (more gently) the rest of him. They worked together to get him re-dressed, and then to straighten her own clothes. He bent his head forward as she ran both hands through his hair to finish the picture and make him presentable.

He caught her fingers on their way down and brought them to his mouth, kissing all of her knuckles. Rey’s heart tried its hardest to beat right out of her chest.

“I know I’m the one who said we needed to be in that meeting,” he said, “but I won’t be able to think of anything but you. So we might as well…” His eyes travelled down her body meaningfully.

Rey chewed the inside of her cheek, preparing an excuse… and then deciding, for once, that she didn’t need one. She looked at the perfect mischievous glint in his eye and decided to just give him the truth.

“I’m a bit overwhelmed? In a good way,” she added quickly, when he began to frown. “So a break would be good.”

“Alright. Okay.” He released her, looking as if it took great effort to do so. Then he turned and opened the door as if it were the simplest thing he’d ever done. “After you.”

Rey brushed his hand with hers as she walked out, so he’d know that she meant all of it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just know that I'm ashamed. But not enough to stop.
> 
> I'm on twitter now! @skyelo_ren


	6. We Might Just Get Away With It

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guys, the Snoke comic messed me up, and I had to rewrite huge portions of this chapter because it was way too angsty and I couldn't do that to baby Ben. So that also means that the very small amount of 'plot' in this fic has been sped up, and it will probably only be 9 chapters instead of 10.

Rey pushed the door open slowly with her elbow, moving carefully so as not to spill the drinks she carried in both hands.

“Don’t worry, I only brought you water today,” she said as a greeting. By the time she finished speaking Kylo had scooted his chair back and hurried around the desk to hold the door open for her.

“Thanks,” she said, at the same time that he said “Thank you.”

She busied herself with clearing a small space on the desk for the drinks, glad to have something to do that didn’t require looking at him. They had agreed, yesterday, that they would meet again for another lesson… but that had been before she knew what he looked like when caught in the aftershocks of an orgasm.

(Good. He’d looked good. Really, really, really good.)

“You said you wanted to know more about tutaminis,” he said when they were sitting opposite each other and had no choice but to make eye contact. (He still looked good, even when his shoulders weren’t heaving and his pupils weren’t blown.)

Rey straightened, some of her bashfulness receding in favour of excitement. “Yeah. Yes! I need to hear more about energy deflection. I’m not sure… I wouldn’t even know how to start doing that.”

“Well. Fortunately, I do know.” He opened one of the boxes he’d brought in yesterday, revealing a set of tightly-wound scrolls of parchment. He took two datachips from the pile nearest him and put them inside, then pushed the entire box across the table toward her. “Here’s some preliminary reading on the topic. But you’ll need to do this on your own time; we still have a lot of foundation work to do.”

Rey stared at the scrolls. It seemed like a lot of paper. And who knew what was on those datachips: they could each store dozens of terabytes of information. “This is ‘preliminary’?”

“It’s a complex topic.”

“Right,” Rey said, slowly.

“Did you expect this to be easy?” he challenged.

She felt her face heat up. “Um… maybe? Yes? I mean, all of the things I can do now, they just… happened. Mostly without me thinking about it. Even the more impressive stuff.” She thought for a moment, and then corrected herself: “_Especially_ the more impressive stuff.”

She half-expected him to accuse her of ignorance, or arrogance, or both. But one side of his mouth quirked up in a half-smile that dimpled his cheek. And Rey’s breath stuttered in her chest, because she knew what it meant: he understood. She experienced a moment of potent connectedness that ironically had nothing to do with the Force (or the mysterious bond it had forged between them), but rather the completely mundane fact that he had once felt the exact feeling that she felt now.

Rey smiled back, and then ducked her head and pretended to tidy her box (though it was already pristinely arranged) when she found it difficult to stop. She was still struggling to control her face when she lowered the lid carefully.

“Okay. Now what?”

Kylo leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands lightly in front of him, looking completely relaxed. As if those same hands hadn’t been on her yesterday, holding her so tightly she’d thought she might leave that supply closet with a constellation of fingerprint-sized marks across her back (she’d checked, last night in the refresher, but couldn’t find any).

How did he _do_ that? And why couldn’t she do it, too?

“I don’t want to overload you with too much theory,” he began, his tone turning mischievous, “so I’ve prepared something more practical for you.”

That word, ‘practical’, said in that way, by that voice… the warmth of it ran down the length of Rey’s spine. She pressed her thighs together and crossed her legs at the ankles to keep them that way. “What do you mean?”

“I’ve placed something for you somewhere in this building. Your task is to find it.”

“Somewhere… in the base. Meaning it could be anywhere?” In his clothes? In _her_ clothes? She thought it a bit odd, honestly, this game… but then, hadn’t he seduced her yesterday with a stupid drawing?

“I can tell you it’s indoors.”

“What is it?”

“You’ll find out when you find it.”

“How big is it?”

He shrugged, looking pleased with himself.

It occurred to Rey, far too late, that she had read something into the situation that might not be there. Maybe this really was just a lesson. “Okay. So, let me just make sure I’ve got it right: there’s an object, but you won’t tell me what… and it’s somewhere, but you won’t tell me where… and I need to find it?”

“Yes.”

“Right, fine, just one more question, then. _How_, exactly?”

“As I said: I placed it there, _for you_. Intention is a powerful thing. You’ll feel echoes of it, if you’re open to them.”

“Okay,” Rey said, feeling the first prickles of understanding. “I can do that, I think.” She closed her eyes and reached out her senses, searching for… ‘intention’. Kylo’s intention. For her.

She didn’t get very far, because there was a huge source of churning intention right in front of her. She peeked open one eye, wondering if her first thoughts had been right after all. “Do you have it? On you?”

He shook his head. “It’s not in this room.”

“Fine,” she breathed out on a sigh. “I’ll try again, hold on.”

But she found it almost impossible to move around him. Every time she floated out she felt her attention inevitably drawn back to her acute awareness of him. And then there was that invisible cord between them, that she had learned to ignore for months and months; but it wouldn’t allow itself to be ignored, now.

Rey opened her eyes, torn between the urge to glare at him and the urge to launch herself at him. “This isn’t working. I can only feel you.”

Kylo looked away from her and stood from his chair. “Yes, I feel the distraction too.” He rounded the desk between them and stood behind her chair. She felt him tug lightly on it, and shifted her weight so he could pull it back, giving her enough room to stand. It was a completely unnecessary gesture, and she was sure he knew it, but the thought of him wanting to perform small favours for her made her feel giddy.

Before she could turn to face him he moved closer, and although he didn’t press into her she could sense the heat of his front against her back. Both of his hands reached up to brush her hair back from her shoulders and card through it lightly, grazing either side of her neck and trailing down between her shoulder blades. Rey bit her lip to hold in a whimper.

“Are you still overwhelmed?” The question was quiet and tentative, so intensely at odds with the way his presence otherwise dominated her senses.

“Painfully,” she whispered back.

She felt him step back from her; heard him clear his throat. “Alright. I have a meeting, so that will keep me out of your way. Come and find me, when you’re done.”

She didn’t bother asking how she would find him. She would have been incapable of it, even if she’d tried. Kylo left the room and she waited several long minutes before heading in the opposite direction.

“Okay,” Rey muttered to herself as she moved through the corridors of the base, determined to stay focused on her task. “Okay, intention. _Intention_.” She repeated the word as a mantra, as if the sound of it would somehow elucidate exactly what it was she was meant to be feeling. She paused every minute or so to reach out with her senses, searching for ‘intention’, but all she felt was the general buzz of the Resistance’s morning activities.

She went to the mess hall, and there was nothing. She went to his bunk and blushed as she poked her head inside, but there was nothing. She even, after great deliberation, stood outside the door of _their_ closet for a long time, trying her best to feel if there was any ‘intention’ inside. But, nothing.

Rey stopped thinking and tried her best to clear her mind, letting her feet go wherever they wanted. They took her down a dingy stairwell she hadn’t known existed, through several maintenance crawl-ways that looked as though they’d been unused for decades. Finally (after a bit of squeezing) she shimmied her way through a defunct vent into a room full of whirring air conditioning units, each connected to a large pipeline that ran up toward the ceiling.

It didn’t make sense that this was her destination, because Kylo couldn’t possibly have fit his massive frame through the path she had just forged. But following some mysterious instinct, she walked up to the unit that felt like it was calling to her the most. She ran her fingers around the edges of it, and whooped in triumph when she found a small strip of paper tucked into a groove in the metalwork.

She almost ripped it in half in her eagerness to unfold it and see whatever it was that was meant for her. There was a message, written in what she now recognised as Kylo’s handwriting:

It’s _1043_.

Her mind raced. 1043. 1-0-4-3. 10-43. Was it a count, a code, a date? She spun in a circle, searching the room for clues, and her eyes landed on a chronometer on the far wall. The time read _10:42_. As she watched the display it blinked rapidly out of and back into existence, now reading _10:43_.

_No_, her mind protested. _That is utterly ridiculous. He couldn’t possibly._

And yet he had.

Rey folded the note and pushed it carefully into the top fold of her arm wrap, almost trembling with the force of the knowledge of how much he had seen. How much _she_ might see, someday. She took in a deep, cleansing breath and tilted her head back as she began to contemplate the long, squeezing journey back out of this room.

There was a cord dangling from the ceiling. And attached to it, a foldable ladder, leading up to the underside of a manhole.

Furious, she leapt to grab the cord and pulled the contraption down to her. She lifted the manhole cover up and to the side, and gaped in disbelief when her head popped out of the floor of the main aircraft hangar.

“Watch out, Rey!” a crewer exclaimed as his foot nearly collided with her head. “I almost didn’t see you!”

“Sorry,” she grumbled, pulling herself fully out of the hole and covering it again. She stomped on it, for good measure. She had crawled underneath the _entire base_ just to end up _here_? Why hadn’t her Jedi senses let her know that there was a much easier route she could have taken?

She dashed back through the base to the north wing corridor where the command offices were located. She announced to the droid guarding the war room: “I’m here to see Kylo Ren,” and soon he appeared, closing the door quietly behind him.

“I did it,” Rey said excitedly, pulling the note from her wrap and thrusting it at him as proof. “But you were wrong, you know. It was only 10:42.” She decided not to mention her rather long detour.

“I apologise for underestimating you,” he said, though he sounded deeply satisfied. “But consider: how would you have found this if I hadn’t wanted you to? If I had worked to hide my intention from you?”

“I don’t know. How would you do that?”

“Figure it out. Now I want you to hide something from me. Make it as difficult as possible. Don’t leave a trace.”

Thrilled by the challenge, sure that she was now equal to it, Rey rushed back to her bunkroom and rummaged through the mess on her table, eventually choosing a small hexkey that she rarely used. She took it to one of the maintenance offices and stuffed it way down into a crate of miscellaneous tools, remembering at the last moment to ‘_hide her intention_’. Impressed with her own deviousness, she practically skipped to the mess hall and was one of the first people to join the lunch queue.

She wasn’t even halfway through her meal when Kylo sauntered up to her and delicately placed the same hexkey on the table, right in front of her salad.

“You cheated,” she said immediately.

“I didn’t,” he said, “You might as well have left a trail of breadcrumbs.”

“Breadcrumbs? Why would I do that?” Rey asked, appalled. “Who would waste food that way?”

“It’s just an expression.” He sat beside her, too close and not close enough. “You need practice, that’s all. We’ll do the same thing tomorrow?”

Rey nodded.

She spent the afternoon working on the Falcon, glad to have something to take her mind off him for a few hours. By the time she returned to her bunk in the evening she felt refreshed enough to pull his box of writings toward her and unravel the first scroll.

It was descriptively titled _Applying Control Theory to applications of basic energy absorption and diffusion: an introduction and review, with discussion of the writings of Jedi Grand Master Coven._

And underneath:

_Ben C. Solo, 26ABY_

Rey stayed up half of the night studying the scroll, though she never got around to reading the first paragraph.

\--- --- ---

Rey took a little less time to find her prize every day, and Kylo took a little more time to find his; and although it was satisfying to see concrete evidence of her progress, she couldn’t help feeling restless.

Part of it, of course, was that she felt she ought to be learning more quickly. She had been honest when she admitted that she’d thought this would be easier. It wasn’t that she expected things to just come to her -- in fact, everything Rey had ever owned had been won with a great deal of difficulty -- but the Force was already part of her, wasn’t it? It was unfair that it would be such a mystery to her for so long. Kylo reassured her that once she had mastered her senses the rest would begin to inevitably fall into place, and she had no choice but to trust his guidance.

But there was something else behind her restlessness. There was Kylo himself, and her unending desire to touch him. She rose from bed every morning determined to finally demand that they finish what they had started. But he threw her off, every time, the moment she laid eyes on him. He was always so composed, always seemed so sure of himself, and Rey… Rey had finally admitted to herself that she, well, wasn’t.

So she didn’t push the issue, and neither did he; and every evening when she returned to her bunk and began to read her scrolls she would feel a comforting relief wash over her, so welcome after spending the whole day teetering on the cusp of breathlessness.

More than a week passed, and Kylo showed no signs of deviating from the routine they had established. Rey decided she would need to take things into her own hands. At this point she had explored every nook and cranny of the Resistance base, discovering his hiding spots and searching for her own. But there was a sure way to get ahead of him: she could go outside.

It felt a bit dishonest to break the unofficial rule they had imposed on each other, but if Kylo was as skilled as he thought he was then it shouldn’t cause him too much trouble. So Rey set her alarm early the next morning and struck out in the pre-dawn twilight for the line of the forest that grew just beyond the airfield.

She stood in the middle of a circle of trees and considered her options, turning a piece of scrap metal over in her hands. She’d chosen a large prize today, to make it just a touch easier for him, so he couldn’t complain too much about her willful misinterpretation of the rules.

One tree in particular called out to her as the perfect hiding spot. It _really_ called her. Before she’d even begun to step towards it she recognised the underflavour of what she was sensing: Kylo had already been here. Shocked and offended beyond belief, she marched right up to the tree and rummaged down by its roots, pulling out the folded piece of paper her mind had instinctively sought out.

_Sorry_, it read. _I thought it was time for something different._

“I cannot believe that you’re cheating,” Kylo’s voice said from behind her. “I really thought better of you, Rey.”

She stood and spun to him, holding up his note and laughing even as she tried to scold him back. “And what’s this, then?”

“That,” he said, with a great amount of dignity that he had no right to feel at this moment, “is my prerogative as your teacher.”

Rey didn't know if the bubbling sensation in her chest was delight or indignation. She had wanted this, after all. But was it enough? If he agreed with her that they could move forward, then why was he doing it so slowly? She flung the note and her scrap metal off to the side and placed her hands on her hips. “Teach me something, then. We’re at _war_, aren’t we? Teach me something that’s useful in combat.”

Kylo frowned, disappointed. “You think this isn’t useful in combat? Nothing could be more useful. When else is it more important to know what your enemy is thinking, and conceal your own plans?”

Rey shook her head, feeling reckless, refusing to see the logic in his words. “Fine. It’s probably better you don’t try to teach me anything about fighting, anyway. I’m clearly better at it than you.”

“No, you’re not,” he said, and that _certainty_ poured off him again. It was unfair.

“Uh, I’m _pretty_ sure I am,” Rey countered. “I defeated you, the first time we met. When I earned my lightsaber.”

“I wasn’t trying to defeat you. I was trying to disarm you.”

“You didn’t, though.”

“No,” he said, and the arrogant note left his voice. “I didn’t.”

There had been extenuating circumstances that day, Rey knew. And as confident as she was about her own melee abilities (those had been _very_ hard-won), she knew he was more formidable than she was giving him credit for.

Maybe he deserved another chance.

“Okay. Prove yourself. Disarm me, right now.” She ignited her lightsaber, but rather than turning it on him she searched the ground and chose two branches that had fallen from the trees around them. She cut them down to appropriate sizes and tossed one to him, which he caught unerringly in one hand.

Kylo looked faintly amused. “Alright,” he said, lowering into stance.

“Wait! We need to discuss terms.”

He adjusted his grip, his face turning serious. “Name them.”

Later she wouldn’t be able to say exactly what it was that had caused the switch in her mind to flip. Maybe it had been the crisp morning air; or the fresh scent of the trees; or the fact that, after months of spending every waking moment surrounded by the sounds of hundreds of Resistance personnel, it seemed so luxuriously quiet out here, like they were the only two people on the planet. Rey didn’t know what it was. She just knew she was feeling so, so reckless.

“If you can disarm me… I’ll make you come again.”

The effect was immediate. Kylo lifted out of his stance, his grip on his weapon slackening in unison with his jaw. For some reason his dumbfounded expression made her even more sure that she had said the right thing. There was absolutely nothing else that she would rather be doing right now.

“And if you disarm me?” he croaked.

Rey raised two very meaningful eyebrows.

Kylo swallowed and nodded his assent. He re-readied his weapon and waited for her to ready hers.

“On three?” Rey suggested breathlessly. She reached out, trying to sense his intention, and felt… nothing. Damn. Why was he still so much better than her at this?

Rey counted, and lunged. Her first blow took him right in the chest, and she instinctively whipped her branch around to knock his right hand aside, causing his grip to falter. He dropped his own branch, and the point of hers came to a halt just in front of his face, her message clear: ‘yield or die’. It was all over in seconds, and for all of Rey’s earlier bravado she knew it was impossible that she had bested him so easily. She frowned at him questioningly. Had he misunderstood her count?

A wide grin spread across his face. “Look at that. You disarmed me,” he said lightly, and leaned around her weapon to reach for her.

She yelped and danced away from him. “That’s not how it works!” She held out her branch to ward him off, swishing it threateningly. It didn’t stop his advance.

“Rey,” he said, brushing aside her weapon like the toy that it was. He moved in past her guard, so close that she had to tilt her head back to maintain eye contact. “Do you _really_ want to fight me?”

“Yes,” she said defiantly, even as every part of her clenched with anticipation. “Not that I don’t want… _this_. I mean, if I win fair and square then that’s fine, but…”

“You won, fair and square,” he said, without any hint of mockery. His fingers were tugging at the buttons on her trousers. “As if I could think of _anything_ else right now.”

His earnestness charmed her into allowing this to happen, even if it went against her hastily-made plans. She placed her hands on his ribcage, unsure what else to do with them, and watched in fascination as his hand worked its way under her clothes and between her legs.

He gasped shakily, and she thought she knew why: he’d felt her, and now he knew how wet she was. Nothing could ever take that back. She leaned her forehead against him and wrapped her arms all the way around him, squeezing his torso gently to urge him on. A dim part of her mind remembered how much trouble she’d had, when she was trying to touch him in their closet and he kept moving closer, making her access difficult. But she didn’t care. Kylo was smart; he’d figure out how to make it work.

His fingers explored her tentatively, lingering everywhere and nowhere. She had been right, about how they would feel so much different to her own, in the best possible way. She made a noise that she hoped sounded encouraging.

“You said,” he began, sounding pained, “that you thought about this.”

Rey nodded helplessly against his chest. And then, somehow knowing what he was asking for, she snaked her right hand down between them and cupped it over his. She guided his fingertips to her clitoris -- he’d found it a few times already on his own, but glided past it unknowingly -- and pressed them against herself to show him the best amount of pressure.

“Like this.”

“Thank you,” he said, and immediately began rubbing her with slow circles, like she had showed him once, during her confession. Rey moaned in appreciation of both his memory and his politeness. She kept her guiding hand on his until the warm pleasure began spreading up her body, and then released him, satisfied that he knew what he was doing. She twisted her hand between them to find his cock instead. It was hard, and she rubbed down the length, wondering if it felt good even through the thick fabric separating them.

“No, don’t distract me,” he whispered urgently, answering her question. “I’m already so-- just, you’d better not.”

“Okay,” Rey said, and wrapped her arm around his waist again. “I don’t want you distracted. That feels so good.” She rolled her hips against his hand to increase the friction.

“You like just this? Not, ah, inside you?”

She smirked at the hopeful note in his voice. “You can if you want, but, I like this better.”

To her dismay, his hand slid away from her and he pulled back. “That doesn’t make sense,” he said, passionately confused. “I’m supposed to be inside you.”

Rey shrugged a little, starting to feel self-conscious for the first time. “That’s just… how it is.”

Kylo was staring down at her belly, his brow furrowed as if she were some puzzle he was trying to piece together. Rey couldn’t decide if she wanted to make fun of him over-thinking everything, or pull him close and beg him to never stop touching her.

“I need a visual,” he said eventually. He flung off his cape and laid it out on the grass, then dropped to his knees. He looked up at her, and her breath caught. “Or would you prefer to do this indoors?” he offered.

Her entire body pulsed with need, so Rey shook her head and knelt next to him. “I don’t care where, I just want you to keep doing it.”

“In a minute,” he promised, grinning, and guided her to lay on her back. “But what if I can make it better?”

She frowned at his presumption, even as she allowed him to pull off her boots and trousers, leaving her lower half completely bare. “_Maybe_. But I think I would know, you know? I've done this myself.”

His eyes softened and he bent to press a kiss to her exposed abdomen, just below her navel. Her entire stomach flipped.

“I’ve touched myself plenty of times, but it’s never come anywhere near what you did to me last week,” he explained. “_Nowhere_ near.”

“Oh,” she said, mollified. “Well when you put it like that…”

He settled himself between her legs and ran his fingers all over her again, and Rey had a mild out-of-body experience watching him do it, because even in her wildest dreams she hadn’t quite been able to imagine this expression on his face: awed and reverent and focused. She couldn’t decide if it was wholly pleasant to feel so passive and vulnerable. She kept herself propped up on her elbows so she could monitor what was happening.

He slid one finger inside her, and she felt exactly what she expected: an odd satisfaction that was unlike any other feeling her body was capable of producing. It was nice. But it wasn’t enough to make her come. He tried a second finger, but abandoned the attempt when she squirmed and shook her head.

“It’s like I said. It feels okay. But can you just, _please_, do what you were doing before? You were so good. It was working.”

He left his index finger inside her and stroked her clitoris with his thumb, testingly, watching her face for her response. The familiar pleasure began to build again. Rey nodded encouragingly and allowed her head to tip back. He began to move slowly in and out of her, careful to keep the pressure where she needed it, and -- maybe he had a point, after all, because the combination of the sensations was sublime. She began to spiral up toward her peak, and reached down with one hand to grab the fingers of his free one, which had wrapped themselves around her thigh.

“Don’t stop, okay?” she whined, her breath coming in harsh gasps.

“Okay,” Kylo promised, and then, almost immediately, he stopped. He just stopped. His finger slid out of her and his hand moved away -- it may as well have flown halfway across the star system -- and Rey had never, never in her life felt so abandoned.

“Why did you stop?” she demanded, trying to sit up, but his hand apparently hadn’t gone so far away after all, because it came up to her chest and gently but firmly held her in place.

“I’m making it better,” he said, like a complete idiot.

“Kylo, are you the stupidest man in the galaxy? I _told_ you -- oh. _Oh_.”

Rey looked down and saw… not much, because his mane was obscuring her view. But she could tell by pure feeling that his tongue was where his thumb had just been, applying a slightly different pressure (a very wet, very hot pressure); not quite perfect, but made very interesting by the fact that his lips were also close by and working magic of their own. Her toes curled, and her thighs instinctively tried to press together -- but his head was between them, so she tried her hardest to relax them out to the sides.

She sank back down and glanced up at the sky, which had begun to lighten to the pale blue of morning. It seemed a long time before she was once again capable of speech. When she was, she said: “Um. Good. That’s good,” and Kylo hummed something like agreement against her skin.

Her legs were trembling with an effort she couldn't name. His hands ran up and down along the length of her thighs; whether trying to calm her, or just to feel her skin, she wasn’t sure. The feeling of helplessness pushed its way back through her senses and she reached for his hand again, unsure how to communicate it.

“Kylo? It feels so good.”

He murmured something unintelligible and squeezed her hand in encouragement.

“But… it’s taking a long time?”

“I _really_ don’t mind,” he said, the words muffled against her skin.

“Really? Maybe we should try that other thing again? Or um, go indoors, like you said?”

He broke away to look up at her. “Do you want to be on top?”

“On top… of your mouth?”

“Would that help you relax?”

“I’m relaxed,” Rey squeaked. As relaxed as she could ever be while he spoke to her from between her legs, apparently unaware of how absolutely _obscene_ he looked with her wetness shining on his lips.

“Mm. You’re not.”

She dropped back onto the grass with a small groan. “I just feel…” Open. Exposed. Painfully vulnerable. And a bit like an idiot for feeling those things, after she _asked_ for this.

Kylo heaved himself up and left the cradle of her thighs; Rey felt a jolt of panicked disappointment, because that wasn’t what she wanted… But he only shifted away a few inches and rolled onto his back beside her.

“Come on,” he said, reaching out with the hand furthest from her. Rey took it, and he pulled her up and over so she was straddling his chest. The fabric of his doublet felt rigid and rough against her sensitised skin, so she lifted up slightly to hover instead. His hands hooked around her thighs and guided her to move up closer to his face.

She pursed her lips to hold in a half-delirious laugh. “Is this… do people do this?”

“I really couldn’t care less. We’re doing it.”

There was a bit of awkward shuffling while she tried to figure out the most comfortable way to arrange herself around his massive shoulders.

“What if you can’t breathe?”

“Then I’ll die.”

She giggled. The slight movement finally brought his mouth into contact with her again. Instead of pulling away she rocked into it, urging him on. Kylo dutifully began his attentions again, holding her hips steady, giving her just enough leeway to keep rocking towards him gently when she needed more friction.

“No, really, though?” she asked after a minute, panting slightly.

“Really,” he said, quietly serious. Then, chastising: “I can’t talk and do this at the same time.”

“Sure,” Rey said. “But what if--“ The word broke off on a moan. “But what… um, _Kylo_, what if I have more questions? About your health, you know?”

“Savethemforlater,” he said impatiently in between gentle sucks.

“But if you die?”

He sighed, and she shivered. “I’ll come back. Haunt you.”

“Okay,” she conceded, and let him work.

He was right. She felt so much better up here: more in control, even though part of her knew it was an illusion, and she was still completely at his mercy so long as he decided to keep pleasuring her. Rey suggested his try his fingers inside her again, and groaned in delight when two slipped in snugly. She clenched around them gratefully, and his entire body shuddered beneath her.

“Do that again,” she gasped.

“Do what again?”

“That... thing you just did... with your tongue.”

“That’s what I’ve been doing the whole time.”

“No, no no _no_, that was _different_, it was perfect, please do it ag— _yes_, that, don’t move — no, don’t _slow down_, aren’t you listening? Do exactly… Yeah, that. _That_. Oh my stars pleasepleaseplease keep doing that.”

He did, and Rey couldn’t feel even a little bit guilty for grinding down harshly on him, because she didn’t have room for it. She didn’t have room for any thought or sensation that wasn’t directly connected to the perfect pulses of pleasure travelling up from her clit.

It was _so good_, perfect, and she was so far gone, she had no control left at all; there was a very small part of her that was mortified when she moaned “_Ben_,” -- but the rest of her didn’t care, didn’t care about anything except that she was finally coming, and it felt so right to chant it over and over: _Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben._

His fingers suddenly weren’t inside her anymore, but it didn’t matter because she was already _there_, and all she needed to do was ride out the wave.

She came down slowly. One of his hands was splayed on her abdomen, supporting her weight so she didn’t, in fact, suffocate him. She wasn’t sure where his other hand was; wasn’t sure of much of anything for a good few seconds while he gently shimmied out from under her. Rey mustered enough energy to roll onto her back and then laid bonelessly while he found her pants and pulled them up her legs. She laughed lazily a few times, unable to place exactly what was funny, but Kylo kept meeting her eyes and smiling as if he was in on the joke.

She decided to help him by lifting her hips. She was so helpful, and generous. She was amazing. Kylo knew it, maybe, because he kissed the spot beneath her navel again while he fastened her buttons. Rey grabbed his shoulders and forced him to rock forward, planting his hands on either side of her.

“I like your face,” she said. She reached up and rubbed her thumb down the mark she had made. “But I’m not going to apologise for messing it up,” she added thoughtfully.

Kylo shook his head a little. His eyes lowered, and he looked at her mouth for what seemed like a long moment. Maybe he liked her face, too.

“I didn’t bother you, did I? With what I said?”

His eyebrows raised. “You’ll have to be more specific. You said a great many things.”

_That_ was funny. He was funny. But he’d be insufferable if he knew, so she scrunched up her nose in mock-disgust.

She meant, of course, that thing she had said at the end. Said again and again. When she had been too wrecked to stop herself, and moaned a name that he didn’t want.

“No, you didn’t bother me,” he said. He must be thinking of other things she’d said. He bent down to push his nose into her hair, and Rey sighed contentedly and decided to let it go.

It was the rumble of her stomach that finally pulled them out of it. She leaned into him gratefully when he helped her to her feet. He brought a hand up her face and tucked her hair behind her ear.

“Now what?” he said.

“We eat breakfast,” she announced, and began to pull him away from their trees.

Kylo stood his ground. “I meant to ask: what happens between us?”

She’d known what he’d meant, but it was too much. Couldn’t she just _have_ this?

She dropped her arms by her sides and looked out across the airfield, back toward base and the food that was no doubt waiting for her. “We can talk about it later. Tomorrow, maybe.”

“Rey--”

“You know, I’m… overwhelmed, like before. So.” She shrugged, as if that was that.

“Rey. You need to talk to me.”

“Not when I’m hungry, though. Do you think there’ll be pancakes today?”

He grabbed her chin and forced her to look at him. “This isn’t fair,” he said evenly, but she could hear the strain behind his voice. It made her feel as if she had done something wrong, and she hated that.

“I don’t know, okay? How can I possibly know, when I don’t even know what you’ll be like tomorrow.”

Kylo frowned. “What do you mean? I’ll be like this. I’ve always been like this.”

“That’s not true!” Her voice rose with every word. “It’s like… you were one thing, this one really awful thing. And then you were something else entirely, but then you went back to the other thing, and now suddenly you’re not either of those things, and… and this is fine, _now_, but how I do know you’re not going to change again? And then I’ll be right back where I started.”

There was a long silence while she glared down at the wrist of the hand that was holding her, feeling the weight of his eyes on her face. Slowly he released her.

“I’ve done horrific things. You know that. I’ve never tried to hide them. I’ve always been honest with you. But you…” He swallowed, took a deep breath. “You seemed like you could want me anyway.”

Rey stared at a single point on his chest, her eyes following it as it moved with each of his breaths. Her own chest was moving rapidly, her shoulders shaking with the force of it.

“I’m not talking about all of that,” she said. “I decided already that maybe you could make it better. Maybe you have, maybe, I don’t know. I’m talking about what you did to _me_. I haven’t forgiven that. I don’t… I don’t know if I can.”

“You _can_. What have I done to you? Tell me how to fix it. I _came here_ to fix it.” His hands twitched toward her, but he thought better of it and left them by his sides.

Rey shook her head, her vision blurring with unshed tears. “I want you to. But you haven’t even apologised.”

“I’m sorry,” he said immediately, and now his hands reached all the way up, framing her face. “I’m sorry I took you prisoner, I’m sorry I interrogated you, I’m sorry I stayed with the First Order. It’s all I’ve thought about. And I realised -- can I tell you, what I realised?”

“But what about what you _said_,” she pressed. “Aren’t you sorry for _that_?”

“What part of what I said? When?”

“You said…” Her voice quavered, and she truly resented him for making her repeat the ugly words. But, if there was even the smallest chance that this could be _over_, then maybe it was worth it. “You said that I was thrown away. That I came from nothing.”

He sighed, looking more acutely miserable than anyone she’d ever seen. His thumbs began to rub at her cheeks before she noticed they were wet. “No, Rey. Those things in particular, I’m not sorry for.”

She ripped herself away from him. “Why not?!”

“Because they were true.”

“I DON’T CARE! You _knew_ how much they would hurt me and you said them anyway! How can you do that and then pretend to care about me?”

Kylo watched her in apparent disbelief. “What should I have done instead? Pretend we live in a fairytale? Tell you that you didn’t grow up starving in the desert, and I never murdered anyone?”

“No, of course not--”

“So, you’d prefer that I never said anything to you, so long as we live?”

“No, don’t be stupid! And _don’t_ be sarcastic!”

He spread his arms wide, gesturing grandly. His expression was still miserable, but now there was a spiteful twist in it.. “I’m a sarcastic person, Rey. And a stupid one, apparently. Should I apologise for it? Can you forgive any of it, or should I just lie instead?”

Rey was done. She flicked a rude gesture at him and turned away, crashing through the underbrush of their circle of trees.

She heard his loud footsteps behind her, and his voice chased her. “Rey, if you walk away from me again right now, I…” He trailed off, before adding, exasperated, “I’ll still run after you.”

She turned and shouted back, trying to inject venom into her voice, but it betrayed her and cracked instead. “If I’m as wrong about everything as you say I am, then why would you even want to?”

He did run after her, in the end, but it was only to walk by her side in sullen silence. He remained there until she reached her home corridor and for a moment she worried he would follow her into her bunkroom and continue the confrontation. But he stopped a few feet from the door and leaned against the wall, facing her.

Rey didn’t think she’d ever seen him lean against anything, except her. It made her painfully aware of _how much_ had happened.

“I need to go back to the plateau tomorrow,” she mumbled, prodding the doorframe aimlessly with her foot. “It’s been two weeks.’

He nodded.

“Are you coming?”

He nodded.

She chewed the inside of her cheek. “What if I shout at you again?”

“Then I guess I’ll have to shout back,” he said, sounding resigned, but his voice held a hint of humour that made her want to sob in relief.

She swayed toward him, without any sort of plan for what would come of it; just following her need for some sort of contact. Her face bumped lightly against his chest and she pulled back without looking at him.

“Thanks,” she mouthed, barely a whisper.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Half of the fandom: Kylo Ren is a certified sex god.
> 
> The other half: Ben Solo is a literal baby virgin.
> 
> Me, an intellectual: Actually canon clearly states that Ben will aggressively and enthusiastically eat Rey out any day of the week, no questions asked; but he is way too shy to even think about kissing her on the lips.
> 
> (I have twitter now and I'm obsessed with it, come say hi, I need friends. @skyelo_ren)


	7. tell me that I'm all you want, even when I break your heart

Rey folded her emergency shelter into its slipcase and tucked it inside the custom pocket she had built on the side of her pack. She checked the integrity of the straps before slinging it onto her back, muttering quietly all the while.

Her hair was tied up today, in one neat bun on the back of her head. It made her feel sensible.

She cast one last glance around her bunkroom, checking off her mental inventory to make sure nothing had been left behind. Satisfied, she began the short walk towards the hangar, still talking under her breath.

She had a lot of things to say to Kylo, and hours of hiking time to say them in. She repeated them over and over to herself, determined to remember them all.

The hangar was never empty, but it was quiet at this time of morning. Rey nodded greetings to the few crewers she passed as she scanned the space for Kylo. Her eyes usually found him instantly, but not today. A small tendril of panic began to unfurl in the pit of her stomach as her eyes glanced over the row of starfighters a third time.

“Good morning, Miss Rey!” called the voice of Leia’s protocol droid. His golden head popped into her field of vision, startling her.

“Hi, Threepio,” Rey returned, as tonelessly as possible, to avoid inviting further conversation.

She turned slightly away from him, continuing her search. C-3PO sidestepped jankily back into her line of view. She turned away again, and again he followed her, determined that she make eye contact with his expressionless face.

“Can I help you with something?” Rey asked reluctantly.

C-3PO lifted an imperious hand, as if to make an announcement. “Actually, Miss, it is _I_ who am here to help _you_! Did you know that I am fluent in over six million forms of communication, including all forms of encrypted data codeage currently in use by the Resistance?”

“Oh. That’s… impressive. But I’m kind of in the middle of something, so…”

“And so it is my great pleasure,” the droid continued, as if she hadn’t said anything, “to assist you in your travels today, so that I may serve as the link between yourself and the surveillance droids who share your purpose.”

Rey shook her head vigorously to ward off the implications of his words. “No, no. No. _You’re_ not helping me. Kylo Ren is meant to be helping me. You know, he’s… the big guy? Really tall? And he, walks. Kylo Ren, you know?” She used both hands to draw a big rectangle around herself, approximating Kylo’s frame.

C-3PO watched her demonstration, head tilted as he struggled to process her message. His photoreceptor lights twinkled and he pointed over her shoulder. “Yes, it appears you are correct, Miss. Here he comes now. Our quest will begin at last!”

She followed the direction he indicated and felt a thrill of relief race down her spine when she confirmed, yes, he was here. Rey’s sensible hairstyle immediately proved itself to be absolutely useless. It had been silly of her to think it ever stood a chance against Kylo’s own hairstyle, which was just messy enough to remind her of how disheveled she had seen it yesterday, in those golden moments that followed her orgasm.

She looked away, fidgeting with the strap of her backpack where the edge had begun to fray. C-3PO was still babbling on about how invaluable his presence would be to her mission, and how strange it was that he had never been called upon to help her before. Rey managed, with difficulty, to focus on the droid’s stilted voice and not the rhythmic thud of Kylo’s footsteps.

“Here,” Kylo said, suddenly hovering somewhere above her left ear. He handed her a cup of caf, and Rey said “Thanks” automatically as she took it. He lifted a second cup to his lips and grimaced slightly as he sipped from it.

Rey leaned over to confirm what he was drinking. “I thought you didn’t like caf.”

“I do today,” he half-sighed. His eyebrows lifted slightly, sharing a look of controlled alarm, and he steadfastly refused to look in C-3PO’s direction. He took back her cup and set it next to his on a nearby workstation while he wordlessly slid her backpack down her arms and pulled it onto his own back. She offered him a small smile and resisted the urge to reach up and adjust the straps on his shoulders.

The strange party began to make their way toward Rey’s trail, making much slower progress than she would have liked. Kylo’s eyes met hers in commiseration every time C-3PO exclaimed his displeasure at slight irregularities on the path that his mechanical body found difficult to navigate.

Finally, Rey broke her tense silence. “What did you expect, Threepio? You knew there was rocky terrain out here.”

“I was assured by General Leia Organa _herself_ that the journey was safe!” he replied pompously.

“It is safe,” Rey snapped. “But it’s still a journey. Maybe you should just wait for us here, and we’ll tell you if we find anything.”

C-3PO made a mechanised noise of displeasure. “I have been instructed -- as I have tried explaining _many_ times already, Miss --”

“No one’s asking you to keep explaining,” Rey interrupted.

“-- to accompany you while you search for oddities, so that I may report them immediately to the surveillance droids! How will I report ‘immediately’ if I am not in your vicinity?”

Rey didn’t have an answer. She kept forging ahead, stomping a little louder than before.

“Just keep walking,” Kylo said firmly. “Your motion centers will recalibrate in a few moments, and it will get easier.”

“Oh, I do hope so,” C-3PO said, sounding as miserable as Rey felt.

She had really wanted this opportunity to talk to Kylo. And she had thought he wanted the same thing: he’d asked her for it, yesterday. She tugged nervously on her arm wraps as she considered that maybe he had changed his mind.

“Was this your idea?” she asked him quietly, nudging her shoulder slightly in C-3PO’s general direction.

Kylo shot her an offended look. “Of course not.” He paused before adding, a little reluctantly: “I may have mentioned that it would be more efficient for us to communicate with the surveillance droids directly from now on, rather than relaying through base. But I didn’t foresee this outcome.”

Rey’s brain plucked out the key words and mulled them over. _Us_. _From now on_. As if he expected there would be an ‘us’, from now on.

“For a minute I thought maybe you weren’t coming,” Rey said to him, not sure what she was testing for, but hoping desperately that he passed.

“I said I would.”

“I know, but I thought maybe, after yesterday…”

“I said I would,” he repeated in a tone that gently dissuaded further argument.

Some of her anxiety melted away. He hadn’t changed his mind. He wanted her to trust him. He’d admitted as much, when she let him touch her the first time.

“I do believe you were right, sir,” C-3PO’s voice cut in, sounding self-satisfied. “I have mastered the terrain at last.”

Rey peeked over her shoulder and saw the droid stepping impossibly lightly over the pebbles littering the trail. A tuft of thick weeds poked out of the rock, threatening to trip him up, but he glided over it effortlessly.

She turned to Kylo suspiciously and found him already smirking at her.

“You’re doing that,” she said.

He nodded. “It’s always best to use the path of least resistance with him.” The smirk faded and he regarded her thoughtfully before darting his eyes back to the front. “I’ve known Threepio all my life,” he added.

The barely-there hint of sadness in his voice acted as a spark that set her entire being on fire. She moved a fraction closer to him, just enough for her shoulder to occasionally brush his arm while they walked. “That must have been taxing,” she said, careful to keep her tone light.

Was she imagining it, or was he leaning into her slightly, chasing the contact between them?

“It wasn’t all terrible,” he said. “When it was just the two of us I would ask him to do complex calculations that took up most of his processing power. The best I ever thought of was: what are the odds that a sandsnake on Pantora will tunnel deeply enough into the moon’s core to trigger an earthquake which splits the continent’s crust into the exact shape of their Assembly’s insignia? It took him nineteen minutes.”

Rey raised an eyebrow. “And what are the odds?”

“Apparently negligible,” Kylo said.

She laughed. “That’s not good enough. You should demand a recalculation, right now. Get us nineteen minutes of peace? Maybe even twenty? I bet Threepio hates having something so vague on his record.”

Kylo’s shoulders shifted in a movement that might have been an uncomfortable shrug. “I think the memory’s been wiped.”

“Oh,” Rey said, sobering.

Of course. It made sense, that C-3PO would have been forced to forget the boy he had known. Rey didn’t believe that machines could ache in the same way that humans could, but… she knew what it was like, to lose one’s family. She wouldn’t wish even a fraction of it on anyone, or anything.

She looked up into Kylo’s face, allowing her stomach to flutter. _He_ was so close right now.

“I’ve been thinking a lot, about what you did yesterday,” she told him.

His eyes snapped to hers, looking surprised but immensely pleased.

She blushed. “No, I meant, not just _that_ but… the _way_ you did it, specifically.”

His lips spread into a wide smile. She did her best not to look at them. But looking at his eyes was hopeless, too, because they were dancing with a mischief that threatened to completely derail the conversation.

“Stop joking,” she said, only half-admonishing. “I’m being serious.”

“I haven’t said a word.”

“No, but your _face_.”

He leaned in close, looming over her. “I thought you liked my face,” he teased; and Rey abruptly stopped walking so she didn’t fall over her own feet. He stopped too, bringing a hand up to cup her elbow.

“Threepio, you should take the lead for a while,” he said after a few seconds, when the droid had caught up enough to be back in earshot. “We’re struggling a bit.”

C-3PO reached them with a few more light steps and graciously agreed to overtake them, so that the poor humans might learn a thing or two from his perfect posture and deportment.

Kylo watched him move a safe distance away and then pulled her to the side of the path, giving them some illusion of privacy.

“Tell me what you mean,” he said, in that way of his that was coaxing and commanding all at once.

Rey had been planning to tell him this, but it still made her feel exposed to look into his eyes while she did. “I mean, I’ve thought about what you did, when you pulled me over you. I know you were trying to make me feel safe. And you did. I did.”

The corners of his lips quirked, but he smothered the smile. “And then you didn’t,” he said, accusatory.

Rey nodded.

“Why?” he challenged.

She frowned. “I told you why.”

“And I told you why your ‘why’ was wrong.”

“That’s not… you can’t just tell me I’m _wrong_.”

“Even when you are?”

Rey exhaled forcefully, wishing he would just concede this one thing that kept needling at them. “Why does it matter so much to you?”

His hands came up to cradle her face, and she couldn’t stop her eyes from fluttering closed when his thumbs stroked across her cheeks.

“Because I’ve seen your soul, Rey. I’ve seen how powerful you are. How powerful you could be. I don’t understand why you don’t want that for yourself.” He stepped a fraction closer to her.

Her eyes opened and narrowed. “Well I’ve seen you, too. And you won’t be what you’re supposed to be, either.”

“And what am I supposed to be?”

Her mind raced to find the words to explain what she _knew_. What she hoped she knew. What she had been sure about, once; and now she clung to the memory of that certainty, because it had felt so much better than everything that had come after it.

“With me,” she said finally. “You’re supposed to be with me. With your family. You…” She couldn’t swallow, around this lump in her throat. Could barely breathe. “You, just… you. _Ben_. Stay.”

His lips were on her forehead, her cheekbones, her throat. Rey grabbed the back of his head and pressed him harder into her skin, determined to _keep_ him there, to never let herself get left behind again.

“It’s alright,” Ben said. “It’s alright. I’m not going anywhere.”

She twisted her fingers more tightly into his hair. “Promise.”

“I promise.”

Rey shook her head in disbelief even as she pulled all of him closer to her. “_How_?”

He slowly disentangled himself from her grip, impossibly gently, so she knew it wasn’t a rejection. He coaxed her hand from his hair and brought it to his lips, kissing his smile onto her knuckles.

“Well, let’s review. You rejected me, left me to die, and then spent months pretending none of it had even happened. And I still wanted you. More than anything. So I think the odds of me changing my mind now are negligible.”

“No,” she insisted, appalled by his accusation. “That was… it was different. That was _Kylo_.”

His lips pursed, disappointed. “They’re just names, Rey.”

“They’re _not_.”

“Call me whatever you want. Changing a name doesn’t change what I am. It took me… too long, to know that. But I do now.” His hands ran down her arms, moved to her hips, then back to her face. As if he couldn’t decide where he wanted them; or maybe he just wanted them everywhere.

She let him touch her, but she didn’t touch him back.

“I know what it is that you want from me, but I can’t give that to you. I can’t just be one half of myself. I’ve _tried_. I tried for Luke; for Snoke. It never felt right. Nothing in my life has ever felt as right as these last few weeks with you. So… please, don’t run away from me again. I want you to stay with me. All of me.”

Rey searched his face.

“We need to catch up to Threepio,” she said finally.

Something behind his eyes bent; she pushed herself up onto her toes and hurriedly kissed his cheek before it could break. “Trust me,” she urged. Her nose bumped his when she moved to kiss his other cheek. “I know maybe I haven’t given you many reasons to; but trust me.”

Rey pulled him along after her. It took them less than two minutes to catch up to the droid -- now struggling with the rocky path again, and exclaiming softly to himself every few seconds.

“Hey, Threepio?” Rey said as approached him. “Do you know what the are odds that a sandsnake on Pantora will tunnel deeply enough into the moon’s core to trigger an earthquake which splits the continent’s crust into the exact shape of their Assembly’s insignia?”

C-3PO paused and turned toward her, somehow managing to look curious. “Unfortunately, Miss, I don’t, but I would be more than happy to calculate--”

“Thanks!” Rey said, and hurried past him, dragging a slightly bewildered Ben behind her.

Neither of them spoke while they continued their ascent. Rey wondered if he felt the same sense of impatient urgency that had overcome her. She mounted the last few steps (noting with satisfaction that C-3PO would definitely struggle to follow them up here, if he eventually tried) and sucked in a deep breath of air as she emerged onto the broad plane of the plateau.

The nexus was the highest peak in sight. The top was worn smooth by millennia of wind and rain; but it was a perfect oval shape, and Rey wondered why she had never been curious about that before. Maybe some part of her had always instinctively known that this place held a special power, and hadn’t thought to question it.

Although they had never been up here together, Ben moved unerringly toward the eastern edge of the plateau: the same place that Rey usually sat and arranged herself for her meditation. She followed him, and when he turned to face her she moved in so close that she had to tilt her head back just to meet his eyes.

“You’re crazy,” Rey told him.

He frowned. “That’s bold, coming from the woman who just--”

“You’re _crazy_,” she insisted, wrapping her arms around his shoulders and pulling her face up toward his. “You can’t even decide what your name is. That’s not normal. You need help.”

He stared at her, obviously not sure what to make of the dissonance between her blunt words and the way she kept trying to push closer to him. Rey herself wasn’t sure what to make of it. She just felt like she was doing something right.

“Sometimes I pretend that things are true, even when I know they’re not,” she admitted softly, barely a whisper. “It’s crazy.”

Ben’s entire body softened, and his arms came around her protectively. He tipped his head toward her. He was so close that his hair brushed against her temples.

“Will you help me with my thing,” she asked, “if I help you with yours?”

Rey didn’t wait for his answer. She already knew what it was. She pushed herself a fraction of an inch higher to meet his mouth with hers.

Ben didn’t hesitate. He kissed and sucked and bit each of her lips, from every possible angle, bending over her so eagerly that she was forced to arch back. Rey giggled into his mouth when she lost her balance; and yelped when he almost lost his, too. He paused long enough to lower himself to the ground and pull her across his lap, then he was kissing her again.

He took a few detours down to her neck, but couldn’t seem to stay away from her lips for more than a few seconds. Rey found she didn’t mind at all. She ran her fingers through his hair over and over, until she was satisfied she had memorised every curl, and could safely move on.

She fidgeted with his collar and tugged it open, sighing when her fingers tucked inside only to feel another layer underneath, blocking her access to him.

“You’re crazy,” she reiterated. She clumsily rearranged herself to straddle his thighs and pressed herself into his broad chest, cutting off any further attempts at kissing.

He huffed a laugh and murmured her name in response.

“Ben. I want to make you feel good.”

His fingers tucked under her chin and lifted it. He kissed her again, close-lipped and soft and delicate. “Then stay with me.”

“Oh. Is that all you want me to do?” She lowered her weight onto his lap and rolled her hips against him experimentally, trying her best to maintain a pleasantly curious expression on her face.

But Ben wasn’t new to this game anymore, and he saw right through her. “Maybe I can think of one or two other things we can do for each other,” he said pensively, grazing his lips against the angle of her jaw.

Rey hooked her arms around his neck and rolled her hips a few more times, elated when he exhaled a sigh and leaned his head down onto her shoulder. That was what he did last time, before he came, which meant she very much liked her odds of this reaching a satisfying conclusion.

Last time, in their closet, she had done her best to keep herself steady and support him. But now she needed to _move_. So she gently nudged his head back and rubbed her nose against his in half-apology. “Can you get hard for me?” she asked; it was only fair, as she could already feel herself becoming wet and swollen for him.

Ben snorted, as if she had said something funny. He reached around to her backside and squeezed as much of it as he could reach, using the grip to urge her closer to him. She spread her knees out to sink down onto him more fully, experimenting with the angle, trying her best to match up the firmest parts of him (rapidly growing firmer) with the most sensitive parts of her.

They continued to kiss each other; or rather, they tried to, dealing as well as they could with the constant interruptions of gasps and moans and nonsense words of encouragement. Ben moved down to suck at a sensitive part of her neck, and the sensation shot straight down her body to join the tension building in her core; but her lips couldn’t reach any part of him now, and that was _awful_, so she pushed him away and guided him back up to her mouth.

“Ben. You’re going to come?”

“I’m going to come,” he mumbled: a bit dumbly, like he didn’t really understand the words, but repeated them anyway because he knew it would please her.

“You can get it on me, if you want,” Rey suggested.

“Huh?”

“When you come,” Rey clarified, scratching her fingers lightly down either side of his neck, watching his throat bob as he swallowed against the sensation. “You can get it on me. Last time you pushed me away, but… I don’t mind. At all.”

He pulled her hips down onto his sharply and then kept her there, pressed against him so tightly that neither of them could move enough to create any meaningful friction. His breath was loud and hot in her ear.

“I think… I might like it,” she said before gently biting the soft spot under his earlobe.

He stopped breathing. Stopped moving. Rey thought that maybe his heart even stopped beating; the only thing she felt pressed against her now was incredible stillness.

She licked her lips and tried to wet the inside of her mouth. She wriggled carefully against his erection, not sure if she was doing the right thing or not. “It’s _mine_ after all, right? I’m earning it. I’m the one making you feel this way. I--”

Suddenly Ben’s hands were in her hair and his lips were all over her face, babbling senselessly that yes, yes he would come _all over_ her; he’d give her _everything_; it was _hers_, all of it. He pulled lightly on her hair to tip her head back and licked a long, messy stripe up the side of her neck.

Sensing that there wasn’t much time, she pushed him away from her and down to the ground. She scooted back off his lap to sit on his thighs instead, granting him access to himself. Ben reached for the buttons on his pants, and it seemed only milliseconds later that his cock was out and pointing up at her, his hand pumping up and down it with obviously-practised strokes.

“Rey,” he grunted urgently.

She obliged him by reaching down and pulling her shirt up over her head, allowing it to fall to the ground somewhere beside them.

Rey had never given much thought to what she looked like. She hadn’t even known the details of her own face until she was in her early teens, when she had found a miraculously unbroken piece of mirror glass and spent the next few evenings experimenting with her expressions and counting her freckles. She’d wanted to keep it, but she’d also wanted to eat, so she reluctantly traded it to Unkar Plutt six days later. And then her looks seemed unimportant again.

But right now, perched on top of Ben Solo, or Kylo Ren -- it didn’t matter what anyone called him:_ he_ was here with her, _he_ wanted her, _he_ couldn’t take his eyes off her -- she felt beautiful. Magnetic. Invincible.

His eyes were drinking her in hungrily, roving over her exposed skin as if he couldn’t decide where to land his focus; but they lingered on her chest more than anywhere else. She raised her hands toward her breasts, following her urge to squeeze them. Maybe she’d show him where they were most sensitive, in case he wanted to touch them.

But Ben’s hands reached up to bat her own away. His entire torso lifted off the ground, and he sounded almost panicked. “No, let me see, please don’t--”

“I just want to touch,” Rey said, impressed with how steady her voice sounded even when she felt like the entire planet was quivering. “Is that okay? Can I, since you are?” It wasn’t really a question, so she didn’t wait for a response. She kept one hand where it was, with the index finger circling around her nipple, and slid the other down her own pants. Her fingers glided between her labia easily, all of her already so wet and ready in response to the heat of his body between her thighs. Usually she might consider touching all the parts of herself in turn, taking her time; but right now she needed to catch up to Ben, so she had herself moaning and squirming within seconds.

Ben crumpled, releasing a hard exhale as his back hit the ground again. He lay motionless beneath her, eyes flicking rapidly between her face, her chest, and the bulge of her hand between her legs. His lips parted and his tongue darted out to wet them. They were plumper than usual, swollen from kissing her; Rey whimpered, remembering the bliss of them sucking on her clit, and slid two fingers inside herself.

She was _so close_, already, but he wasn’t. She slowed her movements and waited what seemed an eternity before Ben moved again, taking his cock in one hand and cupping the other underneath for support. It seemed redder than before, almost painful-looking, ludicrously large in his ludicrously large hands. Fluid leaked from the tip and she watched helplessly as he collected it and spread it around, grunting in satisfaction.

Rey gyrated against her own palm as she watched him pleasure himself. She was-- almost-- she felt his name bubbling inside her chest, preparing for release--... but his hand stopped again, and so did hers, confused.

“Ben,” she complained, and he started again. More vigorously than last time, but it was over even more quickly: more fluid leaked from him, and he paused, breathing heavily, watching her.

Rey tried her hardest to match his movements, to wait for him; but it was torture, being driven to this edge over and over only to hit a glass wall and be driven back. She released her breast and slid her hand up his torso, bracing herself on his chest to lean forward.

“Ben -- I want to -- can we --”

He nodded, eager, encouraging. His fist tightened around his erection and his strokes grew faster, more frantic. His hips began bucking up to meet his own hand; only small thrusts, but right now her entire world was his thighs, so she chased the rhythm of them beneath her. He mumbled something that might have been “want you to come”, but the words were thick and rolled together.

She realised -- slowly, through the haze of her pleasure -- that he had been waiting for her, even as she had been waiting for him. She laughed (it came out broken, between harsh panting breaths), delighted with how stupid they both were. She would have done absolutely _anything_ for him in that moment; would tear every single atom in her body apart, one by one, if it would somehow drive him closer to orgasm.

“Rey. You have to tell me.” His voice was stronger now, bolstered by determination, and she nodded in fervent agreement before she knew what he was asking for. “You have to tell me when you’ll come,” he continued. “One day I’ll know.” He was still thrusting gently beneath her, the pressure of his thighs between her legs augmenting her own movements, increasing her own friction. “One day, when I’ve made you come over and over. When I’ve tasted -- ahhh -- when I’ve tasted you so many times. Then you won’t have to tell me. I’ll know. I’ll know before you do.” His free hand left her thigh and moved to cover the one she had planted on his chest. His fingertips curled around hers securely, a promise of some kind. “But, today, I need you to tell me when you’ll come.”

She shifted her hand to try to return his grip; but only managed to dig her fingernails more sharply into the fabric covering his chest. It was all she could do right now without losing her balance. She hoped the harsh movement was somehow able to convey some of what she was feeling.

“Right now. We’re gonna come now, okay?”

Ben nodded.

So Rey came, bucking hard against the heel of her hand, trying her best to imagine that her fingers inside her were his fingers, his cock, his everything. She instinctively arched her back and lifted her face to the sky; but the sound of Ben’s strangled cry brought her back to herself and she looked down just in time to watch him release thick white spurts of his come onto her belly. She couldn’t resist dragging a hand up and trailing slippery fingers across the places he marked, driven by some primal urge to mingle her wetness with his.

Here was_ proof_, undeniable proof, that she had done this to him. That he wanted her. That she hadn’t just imagined it, and it couldn’t be taken away from her.

Rey groaned in appreciation and smiled down at him. She stretched both arms out in front of her luxuriously and then rested her hands lightly on his hips, either side of his softening cock. Intermittent frissons of leftover pleasure prompted her to occasionally grind down onto him again; but long moments stretched on where they did nothing but look at each other and breathe. It had just gott.n to the point where Rey began to think she ought to say something encouraging or meaningful, when Ben suddenly rallied and pushed himself up onto his elbows, then his hands.

He was beaming, the force of it dimpling his cheeks, his face brighter than she’d ever seen it. “Kiss me,” he said, equal parts demand and request.

She did, leaning forward delicately so as not to rub her hard-won earnings off onto his clothes. She kissed all along his bottom lip with noisy pecks and, on a total whim, bit down and worried it between her teeth for half a moment. He whined with disappointment when she released him and pulled back.

“Kiss me again,” he said, half-laughing. He bent towards her expectantly. Rey placed her hands on his chest and shook her head. She nodded down toward her abdomen, where his come was starting to dry on her skin.

His gaze followed hers downwards, but didn’t make it past her breasts. He made an injured-sounding noise in the back of his throat and reached up to cover them with his hands.

He was squeezing too hard for it to be pleasurable, and he seemed to think she wanted her nipples tugged, which… she didn’t. Still, Rey’s head threatened to float away from her body, buoyed by how open he was with his desire for her. She let him amuse himself for a moment, but when he insisted on pressing closer to her she sighed and gently pried him away. She used all four of their hands to point further down.

“You’ll get this on you. How will you explain it to Threepio? He’ll pester you about it all the way back to base.”

“We’ll leave him here,” Ben suggested. “We’ll leave everything here.”

“We can’t,” Rey said, a bit wistfully. “The Resistance needs us.”

Ben’s hands began running all over her before she had even finished speaking: fingertips running up her thigh, down her sternum, across her lips. “I don’t care,” he said finally, when she felt like every inch of her was tingling with the memory of his touch. “I only need you.”

She guided his arms around her, anchoring them in place with her own. “I know you want to do the right thing. Part of you does, anyway.”

His hands tightened on her waist, and Rey knew what it meant: yes, he wanted it.

But he wanted her more.

It scared her, how intoxicating that knowledge was. It would be so easy for her to get lost in it: to forget the rest of the galaxy, beg him to stay right here with her forever, and use his body to pleasure herself over and over until she broke apart.

But they had a job to do first, if they were ever going to have all of the things they deserved. They owed it to each other.

“It’s okay,” she promised, rubbing her thumb over the concerned crease between his eyebrows until it softened. “We don’t have to choose. We can have what we want and do what we need to do.”

Ben immediately shook his head. “I don’t think so. I tried. For years, I tried. Maybe that’s one thing the Jedi were right about. We have to choose one or the other.” He swallowed; and although his lips didn’t move again, Rey could hear his plea vibrate in the air between them as if he had shouted it: _Choose me_.

Rey just looked at him. “No. We can do it. You and me. I know it.”

“Why are you so sure?”

She knew that, despite his scepticism, it was a genuine question. That he was prepared to consider her answer, and accept it, maybe, if it met his high standards.

So she told him the truth.

“Because I won’t let you fail again. Because you’re mine. _I found you_, so you’re mine.” It was the most fundamental truth she knew. A law so ancient and powerful that even the Teedos were reluctant to break it; and they had no respect for anyone. Rey rocked forward on his lap to breathe her next words into his ear. “I’ll fight anyone who tries to take you from me. Even you. So don’t ever try it again.”

His hand snaked up between them. His fingers traced the shell of her ear, tenderly; and then tangled into her hair and tugged, pulling her back to meet his eyes. She bit her lip to keep from smiling to herself about how beautifully predictable he was: always challenging her, always questioning every move she made, even when she was giving him what he wanted.

“And I?” he asked.

Ben looked at her like he always did: his eyes piercing, searching, trying to look deep into her, see _all_ of her. Like he wanted to tear out every piece of her soul and lay them all neatly before him, and read her history like one of his scrolls.

Rey exhaled, pressed her forehead against his… and let him do it.

_Yes_, she told him. _You found me_.


	8. My Heart's Been Borrowed And Yours Has Been Blue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to [@sofondabooks](https://mobile.twitter.com/sofondabooks) who made this [cute moodboard](https://mobile.twitter.com/sofondabooks/status/1176365813529378816) featuring the real star of this fic.
> 
> And to [@EverSoReylo](https://mobile.twitter.com/EverSoReylo) who leant her approval to all of this. She wondered how Ben's cape works while he's carrying Rey's backpack, and my explanation is: it's fake and in space, and that's how the Force works.

Rey was, thankfully, fully dressed again by the time she heard C-3PO’s indignant cries float up the path toward them.

“You’d better go and help him again,” she suggested to Ben. She arranged herself cross-legged on the edge of the plateau while he attended to the droid.

She slipped into her meditation with practiced ease, allowing her awareness to brush over her companions (“Well, look at that, I ascended those last few steps quite admirably,” C-3PO was saying) and out across the rocky plains and forests that stretched in all directions around her.

Luke hadn’t been her teacher for very long, but every time she came up here she inevitably recalled the first meditation that he guided her through. Ovanis’ topography wasn’t at all similar to Ahch-To’s, but the threads of the Force that percolated around and through the planet had a universal quality that would be familiar to her no matter where she was.

She spiralled out systematically, letting her scavenger’s instincts take over. She wasn’t able to define what it was that she was looking for; she just trusted that she would know when she found it.

Rey opened her eyes. “Kylo,” she called, splitting her awareness between the plateau where she sat and the foreign objects she sensed out past the plains to the north.

“What is it?” he said as he made his way towards her; then, almost immediately: “Oh. They’re non-organic, probably remnants of a meteor shower.”

Rey brought herself fully back to the plateau. “_Was_ there a meteor shower, Threepio?” she asked as she stood and stretched.

“I’ll found out right away for you, if you wouldn’t mind excusing me for just a moment.”

“Go ahead.”

C-3PO’s photoreceptors changed hue to indicate that he was utilising his internal communications array. Rey took the opportunity to nudge closer to Ben and twist her fingers into his cape. She wasn’t sure how to navigate this, now that they weren’t alone.

“Is that okay? That I called you Kylo again? Is that what you want, when…” She trailed off, nodding toward the droid.

Ben pulled the fabric from her grip and closed his hand around hers instead, pressing their palms together and tangling their fingers. “You’ve been saying it all this time. I told you earlier: it doesn’t matter to me.”

Objectively speaking, his hand holding hers wasn’t any more intimate than anything else he had done to her body. And they’d often reached out for each other instinctively while engaging in far more scandalous activities. But something about doing it now, here, fully clothed and with no expectation of it leading anywhere sexual, after all of their unspoken promises…

_This_ was the feeling. This one right here. This was the thing that she had sworn to herself over and over -- as she ran through the smoky remains of Snoke’s throne room, as she hailed Chewbacca over the comms of a stolen escape shuttle, as she forcibly closed the connection between her and Kylo Ren forever -- that she didn’t need. She’d sworn to herself that she didn’t even want it. Sworn that _if_ she wanted it in the future she would go looking for it somewhere else.

But maybe it wasn’t such a terrible thing, to need it. And maybe it was alright to balk at the thought of going anywhere else, when she seemed to have such a strong preference for wavy dark hair and deep brown eyes. And perhaps it was even okay that the owner of said eyes had been too stubborn to stop growing at the usual time, and insisted on towering over her.

Rey wrapped her other hand around his and hers, looked up (and up) at him, and sighed softly. She decided that the Feeling -- like warm liquid, at the moment, spreading down to the very tips of her toes -- was just fine.

“Ben, I--”

She was interrupted by an alarming electronic buzz emanating from C-3PO, followed by the droid’s voice. “It’s a simple question, you dimwitted tincan, and how dare you intentionally misinterpret it as anything but!” His golden body was wracked by an alarmingly human shudder and his photoreceptors turned on Rey and Ben. “Oh, I am terribly sorry, Sir, Miss… I seem to have-- _No I am not apologising to you, you ignoramus!_ … So sorry, Miss-- _Why would I apologise to you when you are incapable of performing even the simplest request without_\--”

Ben tipped his mouth down to her ear. “Too bad they can’t work out that tension the way we can.”

Rey blinked at him a few times before releasing one of her hands to swat him lightly on the arm. “What are you talking about? They’re droids!”

“It’s just a joke, Rey. It didn’t really happen, it’s just a little made-up story, that we tell each other…”

“It was awful,” she declared, fighting to keep a straight face.

They turned their attention back to C-3PO, whose conversation was winding down. He seemed much calmer now, and fondly muttered “Such a good friend,” before re-addressing Rey and Ben.

Several long minutes ensued wherein C-3PO apologised repeatedly for his lapse of control (he’d gotten so worked up that the fuse separating his internal and external comms had reset), while Rey repeatedly, with increasing frustration, accepted his apology and asked him to get on with telling her what he had found out.

Resistance scans had in fact detected a meteor shower three nights ago. Rey was satisfied by this, but a prickle in the Force told her that Ben wasn’t. There followed a three-way conversation between their party on the plateau, Leia and D’Acy back at base, and the surveillance droids assigned to the northern plains. Ben was suspicious that multiple meteors had survived planetfall with enough mass to be detectable from this far away. He began to explain why it was possible the shower had been used as a cover for First Order probes, but Leia interrupted crisply to say that she had encountered a similar tactic once before.

“Threepio, tell all of our droids in the area to perform a targeted search. Rey, I’m going to send Chewie out with a speeder: I want you to go to the site and see if you can pick up anything the droids are unable to. Kylo, I need you in the comms center to look over the data that comes in and see if you recognise any patterns of First Order codage.”

Leia’s instructions were decisive and unhesitating, delivered with the practiced composure of someone who was used as used to giving out orders as she was to having those orders obeyed.

Which is why Rey didn’t object, even though it would be very difficult to keep holding Ben’s hand if he was at base and she was miles away to the north. (The Feeling was still there, content to wait patiently in the periphery of her awareness while her attention was elsewhere.)

The three of them descended the plateau. Ben guided her through manipulating C-3PO’s joints just enough to help the droid navigate the path the way he had done on their way up. He whispered instructions and encouragements into her ear, but although she enjoyed his closeness the real key to her success was the bizarre way he nudged parts of his knowledge and experience out of his mind and into hers.

“Isn’t this cheating?” Rey wondered aloud.

“No,” was all he said.

“But won’t this ruin all of your lesson plans? And are you not going to write me notes anymore, and hide them?”

“Forget the lesson plans. This should have been the plan, from the very beginning. It _was_ my plan, but you wouldn’t allow it.” He brought their hands up to his mouth and kissed her knuckles, twisting his torso strategically to hide the gesture from C-3PO. “Think of what we might do, once you’re on my level.”

Rey lifted her chin defiantly, unswayed by the gesture. “I’m already on your level. You still haven’t disarmed me, remember?”

Ben grinned, called out a distraction to Threepio (“Can you tell me the odds that one of the meteors contains exactly four milligrams of cadmium?”) and used the few seconds of privacy to steal a kiss from her. Rey, who abhorred thievery of any sort, scavenged it right back.

“I’ll still write to you, if you like,” he promised, and the wave of Feeling that welled up in her might have been enough to carry her all the way back to base, if they weren’t intercepted.

The speeder that Leia promised was waiting for them by the time they reached ground level. Finn raised a hand to her from the driver’s seat and pointed his thumb back to indicate Chewie, his bowcaster, and two large crates in the back.

“Get in Jedi, we’re going hunting,” Finn announced.

“Hi,” Rey greeted them cheerfully. And then said to Ben, less cheerfully: “I’ll see you back at base? Try to get Threepio back in one piece.”

Ben opened the door and released her hand (reluctantly, she noted with satisfaction) to slide her supply pack off his back. She stood on tiptoe to kiss his cheek before sitting down heavily onto the passenger seat.

She felt the weight of his eyes on her as the speeder pulled away; and as the distance between them grew, she felt instead the weight of his _something_ in the back of her mind. She mentally tugged on it and felt the frisson of an answering tug somewhere deep inside her.

“What was all that about?” Finn asked slyly. He kept his focus sensibly in front of the speeder as he drove, but nudged the side of his body toward her cajolingly.

“All what?” Rey said, arranging her backpack between her feet and affecting an air of nonchalance.

“You know, the… mwah!” He blew an exaggerated kiss into the air in front of them.

“It was on the cheek! I kiss people on the cheek, sometimes.” She leaned across the center console and pecked Finn’s cheek, providing incontrovertible proof. “See?”

Finn’s profile looked unconvinced. “Doesn’t really seem like the same thing.”

Chewie warbled in agreement and his furry hand batted her shoulder lightly from behind.

\--- --- ---

The meteors were just meteors, after all.

It was dark by the time Finn, Rey, and Chewie climbed out of the speeder and stretched their legs in the hangar. Rey yawned as she wandered to her room and stripped off her dusty clothes, moving about the space on autopilot. It wasn’t until she was in the refresher being hit by a cold blast of water that she realised she was an idiot.

He’d be waiting for her.

She hoped so, anyway.

When she entered his bunkroom she heard the telltale sound of running water; just like that first day. But this time she knew exactly what she had come here for. So she kicked off her boots, crossed the floor, and settled herself on his bed to wait.

The room didn’t show many signs of his occupancy. His cape hung by the door and his wooden boxes full of scrolls were stacked in a corner on the floor. She couldn’t spy his lightsaber, and laughed to herself at the possibility that he had taken it into the refresher with him. The newest addition to the decor was the tray on the bedside table that displayed an assortment of small tools and trinkets: things that Rey had scavenged and then gifted to him during her training. She was glad to see that none of them had gone to waste.

The door hissed open and Ben emerged from the refresher, carrying his lightsaber (hah), and covered only by a towel around his waist.

Rey, who was suddenly wide awake, straightened to attention. “Come here,” she commanded, and lifted herself up onto her knees as he approached.

He leaned to the side to place his weapon on the table, but otherwise allowed her to arrange him in front of her at the side of the bed.

“I’ve been meaning to ask how you discovered the code to this room,” he began, as she drew herself up even higher to run her hands across his shoulders. “But please don’t think I’m complaining,” he added when she leant forward to kiss the hollow between his collarbones. “I have exactly zero complaints,” he promised as she dragged her lips and tongue down the groove in the center of his chest.

“I got it from Threepio,” she said when she had worked her way back up to his neck. “I really should have been nicer to him, today.”

Ben tried to laugh, but it got caught in his throat when Rey reached her arms around him and traced her fingernails all the way down either side of his spine. She toyed with the edge of the towel that covered him, but smirked and released it when his nostrils flared expectantly.

“You know how we always disagree on how many layers you should be wearing? Well, take note, because this is the correct number.”

“We could compromise,” he suggested (she was barely listening: the smooth planes of muscle on his chest, and the touching of said muscles, required a great deal of her focus). “Since even you, in all your wisdom, usually wear at least one layer.”

“Sure,” she said easily. Her attention moved down to the trail of hair below his navel. “Whatever you want is fine.” She sat down on the bed again, trapping his legs between her knees and his hips between her hands. Her eyes flicked to the slight bulge between his legs and stayed there.

He must have read her intention, because he reached to brush her hair behind her shoulders and smooth it down, out of her way. Her scalp tingled deliciously and… he must have known, somehow, because he stroked down the length of her hair a few more times while she leaned into his touch.

Rey fidgeted with the towel where it was tucked into itself, and looked up at him. “Did you really want me even after I left you?”

Ben hesitated. “I was angry about it, for a long time.” His knuckle rubbed along the angle of her jaw, taking the sting out of the words. “At you, at myself. At Snoke, mostly. I thought he was taunting me from the netherworld of the Force. I burned his ashes again and scattered them in seven different systems, just to be sure.” As he spoke his hand had moved to cup the back of her neck, as if he needed something solid to hold onto. He took a deep breath that wracked his entire body. “I don’t want to think about him, now. But I still wanted you, and I was sure it wasn’t him. You wouldn’t allow me through to speak to you, so I contacted General Organa. She made me prove that I wasn’t a threat before she revealed the location of the base. It took… a while.”

Rey waited a few breaths before replying, to give his words the space they needed. She could have avoided replying at all; could have pretended it didn’t even matter, and carried on with touching him instead. She could have trusted that the bond between them would sort out all of the messy details. She _wanted_ to.

But, he deserved to know. To hear her say it.

“I didn’t want you,” she told him, and forced herself to maintain eye contact.

Ben’s mouth curled reluctantly into something that was trying its hardest to be a smile. “It’s alright--”

“No, wait, let me finish.” She tightened her fingers in his towel urgently. “I didn’t _let_ myself. I didn’t let myself even think about you. I convinced myself that… that you didn’t even _exist_, and there was only Kylo Ren, and I hated him. But, listen…” She paused to pepper kisses across every part of his abdomen that she could reach from her seated position.

“Listen. The moment you stepped onto this planet -- before then, even, the moment I knew you were coming -- I haven’t stopped thinking about you. I couldn’t keep myself away, and I tried so hard to pretend that it was for some other reason. But I wanted you so badly… I _missed_ you… so badly, that I even thought maybe it would just be okay to just have your body, no matter who was in it. But that’s not enough. I want everything. Because you’re _everything_, Ben. The first time you touched me, I saw everything. And I’ll never stop wanting it.”

Ben dropped to his knees gracefully and pulled her face into his hands. She thought he would kiss her but instead he said, with great solemnity: “There was never anyone else in my body. Just me. You know that now, don’t you? It was all me. I meant every word I’ve ever said to you.”

Rey reached around his arms to rub at her eyes. Her voice was wet when she found it again. “Even that thing about Threepio and Artoo, and their ‘tension’?”

“Yes,” he said, his voice still deep and serious. “I especially meant that.”

He did kiss her then, and she giggled a bit brokenly against his lips. She let him pull her flush against him and curled her face into his neck.

After a moment she felt his mind prodding cautiously at hers, and opened herself to him. He ghosted over her thoughts without prying into them, as if their souls were mere acquaintances and this was just a friendly visit to make sure everything was in order, and she was okay. Rey bit down lightly where his neck met his shoulder and dragged him further into herself. She took the opportunity to show him the Feeling (it had been bubbling excitedly ever since she entered the room) and to wonder, a bit shyly, if he had one like it.

Ben groaned and pulled her even closer, drawing her off the bed, tangling his lips with hers. Rey allowed it, but stopped him before he could press her down into his lap.

“Switch places with me,” she said, and scooched away from him so he could stand. She guided him to sit on the edge of the bed and knelt between his legs, resting her hands on his thighs. “I’m going to use my mouth, okay? Like you did for me.”

He nodded mutely in response, his throat bobbing. Rey didn’t waste any more time: she knew that he would quickly grow hard and desperate, and she wanted to make the most of these first precious moments. She pulled the towel aside and took a few seconds to admire his cock (softer and smaller than she’d ever seen it, almost like it was sleeping) before picking it up carefully and licking a long stripe from the tip to the base. Instantly it throbbed in her hand and appeared to grow in size -- which is what she had been afraid of.

“Ben, can you _not_, for a minute? I just want to see some things.”

He looked faintly terrified. “No. If you keep doing that, I can’t… not.”

“Please?” She kissed the tip chastely. “I know you can do this for me.”

He sighed as if she had asked him for the entire galaxy, but ultimately nodded and squeezed his eyes shut.

Rey decided that the most sensible thing to do was treat him exactly the same way he had treated her. So she slowly wrapped her lips around the head and sucked gently while her tongue did its best to move in circles. This was probably more difficult for her than it had been for him, but she was resolved to be equal to the challenge.

Ben continued to pulse in her mouth, but he was still only half-firm and had stopped growing. His legs were shaking slightly with effort, and beside them his knuckles were white as he gripped the bedcovers.

She pulled back to catch her breath. “What are you thinking about?” she couldn’t help asking.

“What a moron I am for hoping you’d do this,” he bit out through gritted teeth.

Rey huffed out a laugh, and allowed her breath to hit the wet tip of his cock. “You’re doing so well, though,” she promised -- and he throbbed again in response. “Okay, hang in there, I just want to try…” She gave him one more firm suck, then slid down to take as much of the shaft into her mouth as she could. She was barely halfway when she began to feel uncomfortably full, confirming her earlier suspicions: she definitely wouldn’t be able to manage this when he was fully erect. She stubbornly tried to force another half-inch closer to him, but it was too much and she coughed around him.

“Sorry,” she muttered as she pulled back, wiping her mouth.

“You need to be careful,” Ben said, but his eyes were open now, exhilarated. “You shouldn’t… you don’t need to… really, the head is _more_ than enough…”

She leaned her face against his thigh, trying her best to seem oblivious to how eager he obviously was. “Can I try just once more? Although, you should watch me. Make sure I’m safe?”

He licked his lips and nodded, his eyes fixed on her mouth.

She slid down even more slowly this time, accompanied by the sound of one long, unbroken moan from deep in Ben’s throat. His erection grew -- Rey had known it would, that he wouldn’t be able to help it -- so there was even more of him left uncovered when she reached her limit. She stayed there for a moment, not sure what else to do. She tried to do something useful with her tongue, but there wasn’t a whole lot of room for it to move.

One of his hands unclenched and came to cup her chin; his thumb stroked her cheek as he gently guided her face back and forth along his length. He was careful not to pull her in too far, but she was still breathless within seconds. Her need for oxygen seemed a secondary consideration next to her need to draw more grunts of pleasure out of Ben: he released them frequently now, and every one made her pelvic muscles clench.

She had just begun to feel the slightest twinge of an ache in her jaw when he pushed her all the way off him. She wiped her mouth and pressed her thighs together as she caught her breath.

“I’m sorry,” he panted, still stroking her face. “Are you alright?”

“I’m okay.” She wrapped her hand around his now full-sized cock. “Really. I liked it. I like how big you get.”

Ben whimpered. He enjoyed it, it seemed, when she said these things. So she had no choice but to continue saying them as she stroked him.

“You must have figured it out, Ben. You’re so smart, you can figure out anything. So you must know that even though you can’t fit in my mouth, because you’re so _big_…” Both of her hands were working, now. “... you’re still the perfect size, to fit right where you belong. You know it. It’s going to feel _so good_. I’m so wet, thinking about it.”

His hands wrapped around her wrists, stilling her. “Show me. How wet you are,” he said, his voice hoarse. His eyes -- they looked black, now, his pupils were so dilated -- followed her closely as she stood on weak knees. She pulled her shirt over her head and hurriedly shoved her pants down her legs and kicked them away. He watched, silent, as she clambered onto the bed and stretched herself out along the length of it.

For a moment there was no point of contact between her body and his, but it was absolutely thrilling to lay before him like this, knowing that once he touched her there would truly be nothing between them. Ben twisted and lifted himself. She felt the mattress sink under his weight as he moved, but he was careful not to burden her with any of it as he planted his hands on either side of her shoulders.

“You don’t want to be on top?”

Their rendezvous behind the airfield seemed like a lifetime ago. Rey reached up with both hands to tuck his hair behind his ears. Instantly he looked younger, more innocent -- even though she could feel his erection, wet with her saliva, pressing insistently against her thigh.

She shook her head and pulled him down to kiss her. “We can take turns.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come say hi to me on [twitter](https://mobile.twitter.com/skyelo_ren)! Especially if you've been commenting, let me know who you are (even if your handles are the same on both platforms, I am not v smart)


	9. threw out our cloaks and our daggers

“We can take turns.”

Ben lowered himself onto his forearms at the same time that Rey spread her knees apart, each of them shifting so that his body rested perfectly on top of hers.

He kissed her. And kissed her, and kissed her, and… it’s not that it wasn’t nice -- his lips and tongue felt _right_ against hers, sustaining, as if she would never need food or water or oxygen again, so long as she had them -- but it wasn’t what she had taken her clothes off for.

She tried to grind against him, to remind him of what the ultimate goal was. But his hips were pressing hers into the mattress, his weight so solid above her that she couldn’t move meaningfully.

She turned her head to the side to break the kiss; but Ben, stubborn as he was, immediately latched on to her neck instead, sucking at her pulse point insistently enough that she was sure he’d leave a mark.

“What are you doing?” Rey asked finally, wriggling her upper body as much as she could to try to dislodge him.

He broke off from her neck with a wet smacking sound. “Trying to think.” His nose bumped against her chin as he turned to apply the same attention to the other side of her throat.

She fought to hold in a sigh. “Stop that, then. Stop thinking.”

“No,” was all he said before shifting slightly to access more of her.

Rey suspected that he was likely to become even more distracted if his mouth moved too far down her body, so she placed her hands firmly on his upper back to halt his progress. “And you call me stubborn.”

He huffed what might have been a laugh against her collarbone, and then became still. “How do I make this as good for you as it is for me?”

“It will be.” She drew her knees up on either side of him and hooked her ankles behind his back, trying to coax him along. “So good.”

He snaked a hand down between them and rubbed his thumb along the hood of her clitoris. “You said you didn’t like it as much. Inside. You said you like this better.”

“It’s different.” She squirmed, trying to maintain enough focus to form words, but she was already so sensitive and _ready_. She didn’t know how to explain to him how monumental the difference was, between the lonely nights on Jakku she had spent trying to distract herself with her fingers, and… _this_. _This_, here, with him, where she could feel the taut muscles of his back, coiled with anticipation, under her palms. Here where she could feel his heartbeat hammering against her own. Here where he was now circling her clit with _just_ the right pressure; here where all she had to do was lick her bottom lip for him to know that she wanted to be kissed again, and exactly how she wanted his tongue to glide against hers.

He slid one finger inside her and groaned into her mouth. “You’re so wet. So soft.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I _told_ you that. I meant--”

“I know what you meant. I’m just making sure we can--”

A second finger eased into her, and her hips bucked involuntarily against his palm.

“_Ben_.”

“Shh. You’re alright. Just let me--”

The third finger felt different. Not unpleasant, but _tight_. Her fingernails dug into the muscles over his shoulder blades and held him in place, unsure whether to pull him closer or push him away.

“Alright?”

“Y-yeah,” Rey stammered. “It’s just. A lot.”

“You need to relax, Rey.” He spoke the words softly into her ear, as if to comfort her; but there was a commanding edge to his tone that sent fire racing down her spine to curl her toes. “This is how big I’ll feel inside you. You need to be able to take all of it.”

“I can take it,” she promised breathlessly, but he instantly proved her a liar: he withdrew his fingers completely and then thrust them back inside her so she felt the combined girth enter her all at once. Her thighs pressed against his sides reflexively but that only made her tighter; drew him in deeper.

“Too much?”

His forehead lowered to rest on hers, his rapid breath hot against her mouth. His entire body was pressed against her now, so tall and broad that it covered her completely, so her entire world condensed to just _him_. He eased out of and back into her again without waiting for a reply, but this time -- she wasn’t sure what he’d done, maybe he’d changed the angle, but -- it was different. His fingertips rubbed at her, from the inside; she dropped her feet back down to the bed, spreading her legs further apart to give him easier access.

“Better?”

Rey nodded, the action rubbing their noses together.

“Tell me you can take it.”

She nodded again, and Ben somehow managed to take control of it, turning the nose rub into a nuzzle that made something in her chest feel tight.

“_Tell_ me. I want to hear you say it.” His voice was commanding again; his fingers confident as they worked between her legs; but his shoulders trembled with effort and emotion, and his lips were impossibly soft when he kissed her cheek chastely. It was almost too much, having all of these disparate parts of him being held against her at once.

Almost.

“I can take it,” Rey vowed. “I can take it. Everything. All of you. Please, Ben.”

He made a noise as if she had wounded him and heaved his upper body away from her, kneeling between her legs and draping her thighs over his. His fingers were shining with her wetness; he turned his hand over and watched them, as if in a trance, and brought his hand halfway up to his face before seeming to think better of it and rubbing it on his erection instead.

There were words on the tip of her tongue, but she lost them when he finally guided his cock to her and rubbed the firm, wet head directly on her clit. They moaned together as he rocked his hips in miniature thrusts that brought their most sensitive parts together again and again.

Rey decided she needed to be somewhat of an active participant in this before she lost her mind entirely. She snuck her fingers past his perfect shaft and wrapped them around the sack that hung from the base of his cock, cupping him the way she had seen him do to himself back on the plateau. Ben’s moan cut short.

“Want me to touch you here?” she asked at the same time that he begged “No, don’t, I’ll come.” Feeling a sense of great urgency she moved her hand to his shaft instead and re-positioned it so that the next movement of his hips thrust him inside her.

Rey couldn’t tear her eyes away from the place where they were now joined. Just the head was inside her, holding her open, because Ben’s hips -- along with the entire galaxy, she believed -- had frozen.

She knew he was staring, too. As always, she could feel the weight of his eyes, his intention. She couldn’t say how much time passed before he brought trembling, reverent hands to her hips and began, with agonising slowness, to sink further into her. All she knew was that her vision blurred when she could no longer see his cock -- when she’d swallowed him completely, when he’d _filled_ her completely.

Their eyes met then, both of them blinking rapidly to chase away the wetness there. He shuffled, adjusting the position of his elbows on the mattress so his hands were free to stroke haphazardly across her face and hair. She wrapped her legs around him again and tried to pull him in deeper, even while knowing it wasn’t possible. The air around her felt thick with equal parts of lust and awe, and some other significance that was somehow separate from the two of them.

Ben moved out and back in, still painfully slow, making her feel every delicious inch. She lost count of how many times he entered her; lost track of how sharply her fingernails dug into his skin. His face floated down to her, his lips running along the shell of her ear -- and because she _knew_ him, knew that he would want to mark this moment with words, she tried desperately to think of some phrase that could encompass the enormity of what she felt.

But he said: “I’m gonna fill you with my come, Rey,” and wrapped one big hand around her thigh, pushing it out of his way so he could begin thrusting into her quickly, with enough force to push the breath right out of her. It took her a moment to catch up to him, but when she did she twisted a hand into his hair and brought his mouth to hers, the kiss made messy and wet by their constant movement.

She felt _full_, whole: the sensation was completely foreign to her, and yet somehow she knew that it was _hers_, that it belonged, that it was right. The new feeling coalesced perfectly with the familiar thrumming of pleasure from her clitoris -- he wasn’t even touching her there but he was stimulating it somehow, from inside her, she couldn’t explain it, but it was _better_ than anything had ever been -- the best -- and so when Ben begged her to come on his cock it seemed the easiest thing in the world for her to do.

He worked her through it as thoroughly as she knew he would, babbling nonsense about something wet and tight and perfect. The blissful haze of her orgasm receded just in time for her to notice his entire body stiffening and shuddering with his own release. She forced her exhausted limbs to wrap as tightly around him as they could, not knowing how else to help him from this position.

Ben collapsed on top of her heavily and laid there for a few breathless moments before finding the strength to roll off. The cool air of the room was a shock against her sweat-slicked skin, but she barely had time to gasp before she was gathered into his arms and pressed against his chest again.

He kissed the crown of her head and mumbled a half-baked apology into her hair. “I tried… I _tried_ to go slow. I wanted to. But you looked too good. Felt too good.”

Rey tilted her head up so that the next kiss landed on her lips. “Why slow? You could have gone faster, even. I would have liked it.”

“I didn’t want to just… fuck you.” He said the last few words quietly, as if they were a secret, even from the two of them.

Which was ridiculous, because they had been dancing around their desires for weeks now. And even if they hadn’t, Rey had been inside his mind earlier (while she was covered in his come, no less), and had gleaned a pretty good idea of the things he wanted to do with her. “Don’t you, though? Want to _fuck_ me?” She emphasised the word just to spite him.

Ben’s neck flushed red, and she almost felt guilty for teasing him. “Well, not the first time,” he said, as if it were obvious.

Rey was feeling too lazy and sated to bother trying to figure out his puzzle. “Why not?”

“You’re not very romantic, are you?”

Her nose scrunched as she considered, and decided that perhaps she wasn’t. He held her close anyway and kissed her again, long and slow and lazy. Rey whined in protest when he pulled away and sat up on the edge of the bed.

She grabbed his arm before he could stand and used it to lever herself into a seated position beside him. She pressed her face against his shoulder and inhaled deeply, as if she could drink him in.

“Ben. You love me, even though I’m not romantic.”

She felt his head rest against hers. “You love me, even though…” He trailed off, leaving a hint of uncertainty lingering in the air. It was only a hint; barely even there. But she _hated_ it.

Rey used her forehead to push his head back off hers and then surged forward to kiss him. She had misjudged the trajectory somewhat, so her teeth clinked against his uncomfortably. She didn’t care. Impulsively, she clinked them together again on purpose before biting down gently on his lip.

“Even though,” she said.

Ben kissed her lips again, and her nose, and her cheek, and she really honestly thought that he might lay her back down on the bed and go on to kiss other parts of her, too… but instead he stood and began walking across the room to the refresher.

“What--”

“I’ll only be three minutes,” he promised.

He disappeared inside. Rey heard a cabinet door, running water, and then another noise that she couldn’t place, though it seemed extraordinarily familiar.

“What are you doing?” she called out. He’d left the door open, so she figured it must be okay to ask.

He side-stepped into the doorframe so she could see the toothbrush poking out of his mouth.

“Oh.” She fell back on the bed and stretched out onto her side, deciding to allow this small diversion. But couldn’t help asking: “Why didn’t you just do that earlier? I heard the water running.”

His brow raised quizzically. He started brushing again while waiting for her explanation, the innocence of his curious head tilt contrasting wildly with the way that the bulk of his naked body filled the doorframe.

“I heard you in the shower, when I came in. You could have just brushed your teeth in there. It saves time.”

Ben froze. He carefully ‘popped’ the toothbrush out of his mouth and lowered it in front of him. His lips opened. Closed. Opened again.

“What,” he said, softly. His voice was made thick by the white paste in his mouth, but he still managed to infuse a great amount of feeling into the word.

Rey shrugged a little, unnerved by the way he was looking at her -- as if he were seeing her for the first time. “It makes sense.”

He turned and left without another word. She heard the brushing noises again (a bit louder, now?) and then the stream of the tap.

When he returned he rolled her onto her back and nestled between her legs again, scooching down her body so he could rest his cheek on her sternum. Just when Rey was beginning to think she could quite comfortably fall asleep like this, with his warm weight anchoring her, he cupped her breast with one hand and began to gently run his thumb over her nipple, back and forth. Suddenly she decided she didn’t want to sleep any time soon.

“That’s nice. You should do it like that. I like that better than what you did before, with the pulling.”

“Really?” he asked, dryly. “And do you like it even better than _brushing your teeth_ in the _shower_?”

Rey laughed. “Are you gonna be okay?”

Ben shook his head slightly against her. “Perhaps. I’m just thinking over all the things I’d endure to have you with me. I’m not sure that makes the list.”

“Oh,” Rey said, trailing her hand down his side and tracing his hipbone. “Well, I won’t change. But maybe I can find some other way to make it up to you.”

Ben lifted his head to look at her, instantly perking up, his grin infectious. “What do you have in mind?”

Rey wriggled, using him as leverage so she could shimmy down the bed and bring her face level to his. It probably wasn’t the most practical way for them to be arranged on the bed -- she thought maybe his feet were hanging off the end -- but it brought her closer to him, so it made sense. Ben must have thought so too, because he smiled broadly as he watched her.

“Want to show me that ‘romantic’ thing you’re so caught up on?”

Ben kissed one corner of her mouth, and then the other. “I really do.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THEY'RE NOT VIRGINS ANYMORE. I hope you're all happy. Ben's happy. Rey's happy. I'm happy.
> 
> Please be aware that this chapter was delayed by an ENTIRE DAY because I couldn't figure out the way I wanted to phrase the passing reference to Ben's scrotum, and needed to assemble an actual brain trust to discuss it. Just a little behind-the-scenes knowledge for you.
> 
> I ended up splitting this chapter in half, again (I just have... too much smut... to write? idk). Chapter 10 was just going to be an epilogue, and I haven't decided yet if I'll still make it its own chapter (i.e. Chapter 11) or just tack it on to the end. Anyway that's my longwinded way of saying please don't get too excited if you see the chapter count go up!


	10. One Thing Right

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry this update took so long! I very foolishly wanted to do a time jump, but Rey herself was acting stubborn about this and kept wanting flashbacks (which I don't particularly like writing). Eventually I just gave in and added this extra chapter of 'morning after' stuff. The next chapter really will be the last one.
> 
> Chapter title is from 'Call It What You Want To' by everyone's favourite Reylo.

The first time Rey woke, the entire world was screaming.

Her body tried to sit bolt upright, but there was something _heavy_ draped across her, pinning her to an unfamiliar bed. She pushed against it and it responded with a groan of complaint, heaving itself up a few inches.

Ben, slack-jawed and bleary-eyed, stared in the direction of the bedside table -- the source of the blaring alarm -- before turning his glassy gaze on her. “Why is that happening?” he asked, managing to sound innocent even though his voice was deeper than usual, thick with sleep.

Rey recovered more quickly and twisted beneath him to turn off the alarm. The silence was immediately broken by Ben’s relieved sigh, and Rey’s ‘oof’ of surprise when his weight fell back onto her.

“You’re clever,” he mumbled into her shoulder. “So smart.”

This was high praise from him. She decided she didn’t really mind his chest crushing hers, if it meant she got to hear such compliments so soon after waking.

She ran her fingers through his dishevelled hair, gently working through some of the tangles she had caused last night. “Are you this confused by your alarm every morning?” She wouldn’t mind at all, if he were. She liked the sleepy noises he was making, and the way he kept trying to snuggle closer to her even though there wasn’t any space left between them.

“Usually doesn’t wake me. I’m already awake.”

“Oh.” She had a vague idea (gleaned from his mind at some point or other) that he had trouble sleeping, though she would never have guessed it from the way he was acting now. “Well, should we get up?”

He was quiet for so long that she might have assumed he had fallen back to sleep, if not for the fact that she could _feel_ his thoughts working (albeit sluggishly) through her suggestion.

“No, we shouldn’t,” he said finally.

\--- --- ---

The second time Rey woke she found herself face-down on the bed, hugging the pillow between her folded arms. Something was tickling her lower back… -- several somethings… -- several fingers… -- Ben’s fingers.

She turned her head to the side to look at him over her shoulder. “Hi.”

He was fully dressed, which meant he must have left their bed. That was annoying. Wrong.

“Your stomach was growling,” he said in lieu of a greeting.

“Come back to bed,” Rey countered, laboriously rolling onto her side to face him fully. Her thighs felt sticky when she pressed them together: it wasn’t an entirely pleasant sensation, but it was comforting. Grounding. It was _evidence_, just like the artless rumpling of the sheet beneath her.

“For--” she paused to yawn widely, not bothering to cover her mouth -- “for sex. Or sleep. Or both, I don’t mind. Just get in bed.”

Ben smirked. “You seductress.”

“I am, aren’t I? All I had to do was walk in here last night, and… how many times did we do it, anyway? I lost count.”

The smirk grew into a smile that caused his eyes to crinkle and Rey’s heart to flutter. “Not enough.” The mattress rocked as he took one of her hands and used it to pull her into a seated position, ignoring her fake groans of protest.

“Actually I was hoping, since you’re already up, that maybe _you_ could do all the work--”

“Here,” he interrupted stubbornly. He lifted a tray off the bedside table and placed it carefully on her lap.

Rey stared down at it for a few seconds.

There was nothing outwardly remarkable about it. It was the standard breakfast that she had eaten every morning for months: oatmeal, some variety of fried protein, a few slices of fruit. Rey would never take any meal for granted, but she had learned to graciously accept that so long as she was part of the Resistance, they would share their resources with her.

This was different. “This is for me?”

He raised his eyebrows and gestured widely to the room around them, as if to say ‘who else would it be for?’.

“You brought it here,” she said, a small note of accusation in her voice. It was a completely illogical thing to do. _Stupid_, really. It would have been so much easier to wake her so she could walk to the mess hall -- it’s right down the corridor -- and feed herself. She was _good_ at feeding herself, she had done it for _over a decade_, and…

Rey swallowed around the lump in her throat. “Isn’t there one for you?”

“I ate while you were sleeping. Rey…” He began to take the tray back from her at the exact moment that she pushed it away.

“Could you hold this for a minute. Thanks. I just need to use the ‘fresher first. If that’s okay.” She kicked aside the blankets and made her way across the room quickly, angrily swatting away the realisation that she was completely naked and probably looked ridiculous.

The surreal act of peeing while staring at Ben’s bathtowel (hanging neatly over the rail to the side of the door) was what finally tipped her over the edge. She sat on the toilet for long minutes after she was finished, fists clenched tightly on her thighs, shoulders heaving as fat, silent tears rolled down her cheeks. She cried as though she was heartbroken, devastated… though of course she wasn’t. She couldn’t explain it, even to herself, except to acknowledge that a _lot_ had happened in a very short span of time.

She managed to pull herself together purely out of worry that if Ben opened the door and found her like this he would absolutely think he had done something wrong, even though he absolutely hadn’t.

His soft knock came a polite handful of seconds after she had finished washing her hands.

“You can come in,” Rey said, rubbing at her eyes one last time.

Ben leaned against the glass door of the shower and watched her patiently as she examined all of the little bottles and jars he had lined up on the counter. She sniffed at soaps and gels and other substances she didn’t know the names of. None of these were Resistance-issue, which meant he could only have brought them with him when he arrived on Ovanis.

“Feel free to begin explaining all of this,” she goaded, catching his eye in the mirror and grinning.

His lips pursed, and suddenly she realised that his patience was only a thin veneer that was on the verge of cracking. She was very aware, now, of her nakedness.

“I’d appreciate it if instead you explained why you locked yourself in here to cry.”

Rey flicked her gaze away from his. “I didn’t,” she said automatically.

Ben exhaled loudly. “Rey.”

“I _didn’t_. Not the way you mean. I just… didn’t want you to think I was upset.”

She heard the glass door rattle slightly as he pushed off it, felt him cross the small space to stand behind her, saw his hands sneak around either side of her to grip the counter. Rey pushed herself back to lean against him, electing to ignore the way that his belt buckle dug into her skin uncomfortably.

“You don’t have to do anything alone anymore,” he said. “If you ever need space from me, then you should take it. I’ll understand. But just now was… I should have been with you.”

She lifted her eyes up to the mirror again just in time to watch his head dip down to kiss the place where her neck met her shoulder.

“I don’t want space from you,” she told the version of him in the mirror. “Nothing’s wrong.”

“You asked me to help you,” he said carefully. “With your… ‘thing’.”

Rey nodded.

“So I’m going to have to insist that you explain yourself.”

“I don’t know how,” she said. Which was true. “Can you just… come and see for yourself?”

Rey knew that her feelings didn’t make sense. It didn’t make sense to feel sad about him bringing her breakfast… and she wasn’t, really.

Jakku was populated by thousands of scavengers, but very few of them lived exactly the way that Rey had. Most of them lived in pairs or groups, and although she never became close to any of them she was observant enough to pick out the patterns. Groups of four or more would often rotate out members so that only three were scavenging at any one time. Rey never knew exactly what the missing group members were doing, but she imagined them back at their homesteads: resting, or tidying up, or maybe just sitting around talking and waiting for their family members to bring home dinner.

She had always thought that maybe, one day, when her family came back, there would be times when she could forego scavenging for a day and stay at home. It wasn’t that she wanted to be lazy: she knew she had to work for food. Just, maybe it would be nice if it wasn’t _every day_. And she would gladly work doubly hard -- or even triply -- when it was her turn, to feed the other members of her group.

So, that’s why she had cried after waking up to find her breakfast served up and ready for her, even though she hadn’t done anything to deserve it yet. It wasn’t sadness. It was just… a lot.

Rey showered, dressed, then sat on their bed and ate her breakfast while Ben silently explored all of these jumbled thoughts of hers -- noticing, but not commenting on, the fact that he was keeping his own thoughts tightly tamped down.

“Okay, I’m ready for my lesson,” she said, hoping that returning to their routine would lift them both out of their moods.

Ben smiled slightly and shook his head. “Look at the time. I’m expected in the war room.”

Rey glanced at the chrono and was surprised to see that, indeed, it was closer to midday than dawn.

“Oh. Well. You’re late already, aren’t you? So you might as well not go. It’d be awkward to interrupt them all now. You could stay… here.” She smoothed a hand down the bedcovers and patted the mattress invitingly.

Ben seemed not to notice her implication. He took his cape down from its hanger and began fastening it over his shoulders. “The flight and communication protocols are being reviewed after yesterday’s near-miss. It’s not something they need my input on, but I’m expected to be there.”

“It wasn’t really a ‘near miss’. It wasn’t anything. Whereas _this_…” She tried her hand-smoothing move again, in case maybe he didn’t see the first time. “This is something.”

Ben glanced down at her hand and then back to her face, eyebrows raised sardonically. He’d definitely seen her suggestion: he was electing to ignore it. “It has everyone on high alert nevertheless. The only reason this base has gone undetected this long is because I was deflecting searches away from the area. Now you’ve lost that advantage. More importantly…” He crouched at the bedside next to her, covering her ignored hand with his own. “Me being at these meetings was a condition of me coming here. If I disappear now I’ll only raise more suspicion.”

Rey frowned. “Who’s suspicious of you?” she demanded.

He tried to smother a smile. “Weren’t _you_, a few short days ago?”

Rey was certain that that didn’t count. Ben seemed sure that it did. They talked in circles for a few minutes until he sighed, stood -- brushing his lips across hers on the way up -- and left.

\--- --- ---

Rey, having made no definite plans for the day, decided to do some self-directed learning. She stopped by her own bunkroom for a change of clothes and her wooden box of scrolls before heading out across the airfield to their little copse of trees.

Ben’s writings were neat and orderly, set out in a logical progression and laboriously cross-referenced. But she still only had a vague understanding of the concepts he was describing. A rather large part of her (a part that she was strongly considering keeping secret from him) suspected that her own limited knowledge was all that was required, and that these complex theories were… true, perhaps, but not strictly necessary.

She switched arbitrarily between reading and meditating, sitting with her back up against a tree, not bothering to keep time. The airfield was less busy than usual -- a side effect of the ‘high alert’, maybe -- almost empty save for a group of mechanics working on the A-wing fleet. Rey allowed the mechanical sounds of their tools to float in the air around her as she reached out into the Force, hearing and acknowledging them without truly listening.

She wasn’t sure when exactly she heard the first ‘crunch’ of a leaf beneath Ben’s foot. She couldn’t recall the exact words he had used when he murmured softly that she should continue, that he didn’t want to interrupt. She didn’t know how long she focused on the soothing sensation of having him next to her. But when she finally opened her eyes he was sitting cross-legged opposite her biting into a Ronto wrap.

Rey beamed as he lifted a paper-wrapped package, no doubt containing an identical wrap, from the grass beside him and handed it to her. She quickly tried to school her features.

“You don’t have to keep doing that.” She could take care of herself. She _could_, she _would_… but it still made her entire body feel warm and liquid, to know that he wanted to share her burdens.

“I know,” he said. “But I’m going to.”

Rey ducked her head as her smile threatened to split her face again, but his fingers quickly tucked under her chin and brought her eyes back to his.

“_You_ don’t have to keep doing _that_. I want to see you smile.”

“Good. Because I’m going to.”

The food was forgotten then, both of them overcome by a different kind of hunger. She clambered onto his lap and began kissing a delicate path down the length of the scar she had made, grunting in frustration when it disappeared beneath his collar.

“Can you take this off? Can we--?”

“Here? Now?”

“Why not? I know you don’t mind doing it outside.”

“And if we’re discovered?” Ben asked. He sounded appalled by the idea.

It was true that this place wasn’t exactly private, at least not at this time of day. She could still hear the mechanics working, and occasional snippets of their conversations carried on the wind. But Ben would never let anything or anyone sneak up on her.

“It’s okay. I trust you.”

She said it lightly, teasingly, trying to cajole him into something she was already certain he wouldn’t do. But Ben’s expression grew serious, the crease between his eyebrows deepening.

“Thank you,” he said, incredibly humbly, as if she had granted him a great favour.

Rey returned her attention to his collar and finally managed to loosen the top few inches of his doublet, unsurprised to find another layer beneath. She sighed lightly and rubbed her lips against his, not really a kiss, just... contact.

“You won’t ever stop wearing armour, will you?”

He shook his head and pulled her to his chest, tucking her face against his neck.

“But I’ll always let you take it off.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Come say hi](https://mobile.twitter.com/skyelo_ren), I don't bite.


End file.
